One thing that HF20 did achieve by putting me out of action for all this time is give me time to think and deliberate on my next actions. Before I go deeper into that, I want to share a bit more about who I am with the steemit community.
I wrote my short introduction post 12 days now and WOW, the days that have followed have been a chaotic rollercoaster to say the least.

Who is this Guy?

My name is Ben Giles and I'm 23 years old. I was born in Vienna, Austria and lived there for the first seven years of my life before moving to NZ. I still have family and friends back there which continually encourages me to keep some of my Austrian heritage and stay on top of my Deutsch. In saying that I feel like a kiwi (what we refer to ourselves as) through and through and have done so almost as soon as I got off the plane in NZ for the first time. I think it's mostly a combination of poor organization skills, spur of the moment attitude and solace in always being barefoot.

Me and my girlfriend exploring

Growing up and going through the schooling system I never knew what I wanted to do as a profession, although I was very interested in the sciences and health. With those interests one would naturally assume it would lend itself to being a doctor. I thought about it solidly during my last year of high school, more specifically the last 2 months haha. I eventually went with something a little left-field in Osteopathy and never looked back. I can talk at great length about what an Osteopath does and the philosophy behind it but that is for another day. In NZ to be a qualified Osteopath you first have to do a bachelors of science, majoring in anatomy and physiology. Then it requires a further 2 years to complete a Masters in Osteopathy which requires a research dissertation, which I just completed last week. Thank Fuck!

The Osteopathy clinic I will be working in

Additionally, I have also been a caddie for the past 3 years to support me financially through university. For the golfers out there il leave a pic of the course for you to guess where :)

Hobbies

First and foremost I am an avid adventurer and love exploring new places. Im completely split down the middle introversion and extraversion. Hence why I love getting twisted with mates and long night outs but equally, could just as easily spend the night at home reading a book or listening to podcasts.
I know it sounds nerdy but I love to learn. I like to get fixated on a topic and study every aspect to it. Specific interests are natural health, exercise and sports rehab, neuroscience, politics, philosophy, sustainable solutions including renewable energy, artificial intelligence and of course everything crypto!

I'm also a mad keen sportsman and always have been. I have dabbled in many sports over the years including rugby, volleyball, squash but mostly play football (soccer) and golf at the moment.
My favourite meal is the humble pizza! As for the drink, I got to give it to beer, closely followed by ice tea.

Thoughts about Steemit

I have known about steemit for the past 18 months but have only been active on the platform for the last 2 weeks really.
Beginning this journey on steem, I was super excited about this project and thought it was the answer to the centralized social media institutions such as facebook. I saw it as a dynamic shift, bringing value back to the users of the platform instead of lining the pockets of an elite few. A chance to establish a democracy within a social medial platform were the users have a voice and as a collective make decisions to improve the usability of the platform. How wrong I was. True democracies are hard to come by in today's world and as far as I can tell steemit inc. certainly doesn't fit this bill either. Its just the same a few steemians with stacked wallets call the shots for the rest of us and we just have to deal with it. I learnt of the likes of Hive account@freedom and others who have huge amounts of SP and able to prop up the top 20 witnesses with their votes. A system such as this renders the platform powerless to change and leaves almost all valued steemians without a leg to stand on. I don't have the answers but currently the rules are set up to maintain a centralized oligarchy and I am quickly losing the desire to tell my friends and family to make a steemit account and leave facebook behind. I believe a good start would be to give all steemians who have shown their worth on the platform an equal vote/say for the witnesses that get chosen to represent all of us, regardless of SP. Voting inclusion criteria could be to have a certain reputation score to limit spammers and give a voice to those who add value to the platform. What that number is, I don't know but again a democratic process should decide.

I might sound like a pessimist but I certainly have not lost hope, we just have a long road ahead of us. I'm going to stick with steemit for the time being and see what develops as I badly want this project to be successful. This next week, however, I'm going to do as much research on the top witnesses as I can before casting an educated vote. I really care who represents this magnificent platform and want to see it develop in a way the majority of users are happy with. I encourage all readers to do the same.