Hello world, hello Steemit!

Well, I guess it's my turn then to introduce myself to this nice little community, that has sparked my interest recently. As you can see I'm your normal guy next door (and, as you also can see, a guy not very used to making selfies)

Me in the morning, recently ;)

I have started a bit more than a year ago a PhD in sociology at the beautiful University of Neuchâtel and ever since I'm in love with this place. However, I won't talk much about Neuchâtel (for now), rather I will talk about the way how I've discovered Steemit and what it means to me.

How I was introduced to the world of crypto-moneys 

Actually, it was only recently (September 2016), that I've started getting seriously interested in Bitcoin and the Blockchain technology behind it. This is kind of surprising, since I'm otherwise quite interested in technology. I think I just didn't take it too seriously and thought of it as just another hype. But thanks to a university project I had to make myself familiar with the topic and I was astonished about all the altcoins, that existed besides Bitcoin. Today, it's hard for me to imagine, that I didn't know back then, what Ethereum was :D

Probably the first thing people hear in connection with Bitcoin is, that its value is skyrocketing and people are trying to jump the train before it's gone. And of course I did the same! I invested most of my little PhD-savings in June 2017, only to see them shrink immensely in July. 

 

As you can guess, I was panicking and thought about selling, as long is I still could. But luckily, a good friend of mine working in investment banking convinced me to HODL. So I will just wait and see what will happen. In the worst case all my (few) $$$ are gone, but I'm still young and I didn't even start my professional career; however, in the best case, I can have an independent life without being sorrowed about money. This in turn brings me to another point.

My quest for liberty

They tell you that money and liberty go hand in hand. There's nothing wrong about that. But what they don't tell you is that whether you're truly free or not, depends on how you earn your living. Of course, you can have three different jobs, just to keep up with the joneses. But does that fancy Mercedes or that three story house really help you in living a good life, if the price is being dependent on someone else's money or goodwill? 

When I was fifteen years old, I worked during the summer holidays at the local department store. My job consisted basically of restocking the storage racks and yeah, it was Sisyphean labor. During that time I had a roughly 60 year-old co-worker. He often scolded me and you could see that he was unhappy with the course of his life. I decided that I never want to be him and so I tried to achieve liberty from an early age on. 

However, back in the days that was not too easy. During grammar school I've built a couple of websites and I used to have a blog in which I tried to make some money with Google AdSense. And yeah, I made some: 100$ … in a year! So I gave up on that idea and forgot about passive income … until recently. Until I've discovered Steemit. I've used to use Facebook and other social media platforms on a daily basis. We post interesting things every day, we make beautiful pictures, we share our thoughts and experiences; only to see this "user created content" to become property of Facebook. Therefore I love the idea of Steemit: here the created value goes back to the community and not to the owners of the platform. 

My dream is, once I'm done with my PhD, to live for a year or so in one of my favorite countries (Italy, Turkey, Spain) and do what I love, which is reading, writing aaaand eating. 

Me and the Steemit-community 

I have to confess that I don't know yet, what I'll be writing about on Steemit. What do people at Steemit love to talk about? Personally I love self-improvement (stoic philosophy) and I'm also very much into nerdy sociological stuff. But maybe Durkheim, Weber and Bourdieu are a tad too nerdy and I will talk about the beautiful city I'm living in, Neuchâtel ;) 

I hope you've enjoyed my little self-introduction and I hope getting to know some of you :)