Hey @phortun, glad you liked reading it - and even so much so that you made this long and interesting reply! :D
Yes - you touch on an important point here, where is the line between being a good and 'less good' Steemian? I think it's a huge grey scale and I also think we know of a few really bad Steemians, which makes a lot of other behaviour look pretty much GOOD.
I don't think we need to be 100% altruistic to be a good Steemian. If you invest time and even money or in your case your other jobs/carreer to be here and to 'make it here' - then we need some form of 'egoistic' behaviour - or we wouldn't be able to be here at all since we wouldn't make any income/ROI. Your behaviour makes sense to me seeing your story and you try to balance it - in the end it's all up to YOU what you do with your stake.
Every action has a consequence though, so those few Steemians that upvote their own posts 10x a days shouldn't expect a lot of extra community support... Doesn't make their actions 'not okay' - it's just a simple action-reaction thing in my opinion.
Btw, I have never asked, is Steem your only (or main) source of income too?
Well, I spend the most time here for sure :D As for income, is it income if you don't cash out? Because I don't. So far. I have some targets in my head that if STEEM makes it to those targets I will cash out some :-) I even keep some STEEM liquid for that case. I have som income in Fiat but it's irregular and I can't rely on it, so I'm pretty much in the same boat as you :D
Wow, this is probably one of my longest comments on Steem ever. Thanks for inspiring me to put it together :)
I feel honoured @phortun - you have a lot to say about your story, hope you feel motivated to keep on sharing <3 Cheers!
Thanks for your feedback Rosa, I really appreciate how you always reply to everyone, even though your comment sections are usually very busy (maybe that´s the reason actually :) Yeah, I sometimes feel the urge to say my whole story because people often see only what they want to see or what they can see "on the surface". I used to be accused of having inappropriately big rewards on my posts but what the people didn´t know was that it was actually also my "salary" for working for some other accounts. Moreover, few people know what it really feels like to take that risk and jump in something as risky and unpredictable as fulltime steeming, head first... But I still believe in this thing because I can see its enormous potential. And I am glad to find out that Rosa is in that boat with me haha :)) Thanks again for this inspiring post, it was also interesting to read the comments.