This introductory post was initially written when I started being involved in the Romanian community, but now I feel that I need to get involved in the international community as well so I decided to translate and adapt it a little so people can see where I am coming from with my ideas :)
People call me Lish, but this user was already taken, so here I am Lishu. I have three decades already since manifesting within the intersection of this body and conscientiousness and I am from Romania.
Ever since I can remember me and how I am, I can say that refusal is a constant presence in my life. But I an not talking about a nihilist refusal in which I negate all that surrounds me, I only have problems with what is imposed.
It still fascinates me how ever since birth, the way I should live my life was decided for me, without even anyone consulting me. The first few years you get to play a little, so you can’t say you were not a child. After that, school starts and it continues and continues and continues, and after that, you start work. If you are lucky you get to have your own business, in which you sell your time for money without so many intermediaries. If you are not that lucky, you need to get a job in which you sell your time for money with a lot of intermediaries. And after all these, you reach old age in which you can enjoy the fruits of your semi-slavery. Yep, I’ll pass on that, thank you!
I would be a hypocrite if I would say that my refusal was coherent since the beginning. A lot of time it manifested as pure indifference, culminating with high school. It was the most relaxing period of my life, I didn’t do anything that was asked of me. Neither learning, not attending classes. But because the educational system is profoundly dysfunctional, I was able to finish without any problems and with good final grades. I also had some tentative with college, but I quickly decided to skip it.
Although this is the way I related to school, I do not encourage this type of behavior because now I have a lot of missing information that could have been accumulated just by paying attention in the classes I attended. The idea is that a refusal needs coherence, there needs to be an alternative response, not just a negation.
Time passed and oh joy, I have access to the internet, the very place where my refusal sprung roots into coherency. As there is a mainstream culture that creates a comfortable narrative for the status quo, so does an alternative culture exist that brings fort other ideas and directions. This is how I realized that my refusal was pertinent, by watching a lot of documentaries and alternative information like Zeitgeist and others explaining different mechanism of control. These gave me a lot to think about.
After high school, I remained in my hometown and attended a medical college for the sake of my parents, which found comfort in the fact that I had a diploma for something. That time was not lost, because it was a period in which I accumulated information and started to understand what I want from me and this world.
Because that school was a little diplomat factory, I finished it through inertia. After that, I went to my parents and informed them that this was the last thing I will do because they told me to and that I will move to Bucharest as soon as possible.
Said and done, by the end of 2012 I was in the capital of Romania and the pleasant and constructive part of my refusal started with this. Because in April 2013 I attended my first protest, against shell gas exploitation through hydraulic fracking, wonderful.
And with the autumn of 2013 massive protest erupted against a cyanide gold mine exploitation at Rosia Montana. This street movement lasted more than three months and for the first two, I attended almost daily. The people I met there started to give me faith in the future, I saw a lot of devotion and sacrifice. I also went to the Rosia Montana itself, there was an activist festival called FanFest, which borough together many ecological an social causes from around the world.
I enjoyed this period so much that all of 2014 was spent in the campaign against fracking in Romania. It was the year in which I grew the most as a person, thus far. I have access to an environment in which there were a lot of different people. I worked with a wide range of people, from homeless persons to science directors in institutes. And after that year I was very satisfied with myself, broke and without a place to live.
At the beginning of 2015 I needed to get a full time job for the first time, being able to freelance my way until then. Three uncomfortable years followed in which I had to sell my soul for money and I even ended up working for a corporation. But it was ok, I was able to build my needed infrastructure with the money coming and I now have a home recording studio, live singing gear and some video gear as well.
Now starts the really relevant part of the story in which my refusal starts being really coherent because in August 2017 I was able to understand bitcoin and this changed everything. At the beginning of October I bought my first part of a bitcoin and shortly after I opened this steem account. This opened the door to a digital world of opportunities I always dreamed about.
For the first time in my life I was in a context that made perfect sense to me and I decided that I should cash out of the old system as soon as possible. And on the third of January this year, exactly when bitcoin celebrated its 9th birthday, I called work and told them I quit.
This brings us to the present, which is the steem ecosystem moment. Never in my life did I see such potential as I see in this ecosystem. We have a lot of very interesting people with a lot of knowledge. We have projects like utopian.io or steemstem, which will play a large role in education on this platform. We have art, humor, alternative new, brutal realities and much more. We have all of human nature on the blockchain and this is something that can change the world.
A couple of months ago I started being involved in building the @steemromania community. For this, I needed to put my thought in order and see how I can contribute in the best way possible. I wrote quite a lot on community building, prosocial behavior, goals, culture and all that I found relevant to this effort of building an open, decentralized and sustainable community. But we are still at the beginning and a lot of work needs to be done, and we will do it.
This started being another period in which I grew a lot and this is just the beginning. The steem ecosystem gave me the opportunity of putting my thoughts in order and applying them to a worthwhile cause. And on top of that, I’m also making some money from whatever I choose to write about. This is as near to a perfect situation as I ever found or imagined. So, the bottom line is that my refusal can get it’s most coherent form in this ecosystem, and I decided the form in which I will try to build it, but this is another story.
If you also have the instinct of refusing the injustice that comes with the status quo, I invite you to make this refusal as coherent as possible, by creating alternatives. We can do it together and steem is the perfect context in which this can be done.
Let’s refuse together and also build alternatives together.
You can check out some of my work here:
Culture vs Authority
XPrize and the power of Decentralized Innovation
A Culture of Consensus
Steem Facilitators - A proposal for organic community growth
Finding a Massive Transformative Purpose
