Hello from Karl - My Life in my 20s

Hello, my name is Karl.

This will be my first post on Steemit. I have been looking for a place for dialogue that is something other than Twitter or Facebook. I think that this seems like a great place to find a soul group who has similar interests to me. It also seems like a place where I can develop new interests and learn from others.

So who am I? I was going to upload a picture, but it appeared huge in the text area. I'm not sure how to re-size it. Perhaps later I can share a picture. For now I just have my blog's logo in my avatar. Forgive me if this is a lot of text. I am not quite sure what the culture here is, but I shall learn in time. Because this is my first post and I don't really know anyone here yet, I figured I'd just start by talking about myself.

I am a dual citizen from the US and South Africa, and I grew up living around the world because of my parents' career. It was a little confusing making steady friends having to move every 3-4 years. I went to American International schools overseas, where the students were about a third Americans, a third locals, and a third international. People who live a significant amount of time outside of their country of citizenship are usually called third-culture-kids. But besides being a foreigner everywhere I went, I was always a bit of a quirky outsider, even among third-culture kids. I spent a lot of time listening to hypnosis and meditation CDs in high school. I spent most afternoons after school in some sort of quiet trance.

What do I do today?
I am a freelance 3d animator and designer who works online. I have also recently started a blog called contemplationplanet.com . I write about space, art, and psychology. I will eventually upload some artwork. Don't worry- none of the articles that are on that site are on this site. I plan to write exclusive content for Steemit that is not on my blog.

I love studying. I feel like learning is a large part of my life. I do not read books just for the sake of advancing my career. I want to read them to get in touch with new, mysterious concepts.

I studied psychology and art at Gustavus Adolphus College and graduated in 2013. I was not completely sure what I wanted to do as a career during my studies. In the beginning, I was planning on being a therapist of some sort. I was always a shy person though, and I was told that therapy can involve quite awkward, socially complex situations at times. Also, my school had more of a scientific-flavor, rather than a counseling flavor to psychology. I would have to transfer to a different college if I wanted to study therapy. So I decided to migrate to experimental psychology instead...this would involve studying statistics and analyzing psychological tests people take.

I had spent a lot of my time in high school studying 3d animation. One of the art professors paid be to help him with his animation project. That was another direction I was pulled in.

Eventually, I ended up in the career counselors office at college, torn between art an psychology. On one side of the room, there were papers with lots of charts and numbers. On the other side of the room, there was a framed photo on the wall of a sunset. I had the personal realization that experimental psychology would be a lot of numbers. I have nothing against the field at all. The issue is that sometimes math gives me problems... and too much math could interfere with my more creative side. I told the counselor that I wanted my life to be about creativity.

But by the end of college, I had settled on a creative career. I had some previous experience in 3d animation, but my knowledge had lots of holes in it. My college did not specifically teach 3d animation. I was not ready to work in a professional setting yet. For about a year, I took some very specialized, online, career-focused classes elsewhere to help me brush up my knowledge. I did a lot of this while working an office job (creating welcome packets for newcomers to the organization).

I loved studying animation. However, one of the problems I had was that some animation careers paths were way too specialized and competitive for my preferences. If I wanted to work for a big name like Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks, I could only get there by specializing. I was told the easiest entrance was through being really good at some specialized rigging task. Rigging is basically setting up the joints that define how a character or lighting setup can move. For example, I could specialize in rigging hands. I eventually realized that working for a big-name company was not for me. This was partly because my family was all moving to South Africa, and I would be the only one still in the US. By the end of my animation training, I tailored my learning towards working for smaller clients. For example, I could create kickstarter animated ads, animated youtube intros, product ads, and children's animation.

After moving with my family to South Africa, I got my first few animation gigs online. I was quite exploited, because I was working in a global online marketplace. But my plan was to raise my price slowly over time. I am still exploited quite a lot, but its better than before. My career could be called animation, but it also falls into general online content creation.

I began to miss psychology. One of my favorite classes was humanistic psychology. The teacher had a very colorful personality. She often talked about how art, mythology, and psychology are all related. Out of all of the professors, she was the oldest. She preferred older psychological theorists, such as Jung. A lot of the other teachers were much more statistics-focused. Many other students did not relate to my humanistic psych teacher because she was a little esoteric. But I appreciated what she taught me. Remembering this, I had a desire to integrate my personal interests and research into online content creation.

One of my favorite movies as a child was Contact. Ever since I saw Jodie Foster go on her interstellar journey, I became interested in everything mysterious and far out. I was not a big space reader in high school, but I was after college. Between animation gigs, I would read books and watch videos about space. After I saw a clip of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, and the potential life on Europa, I became hooked. I would spend at least two hours a day reading about space and astronomy.

This is when I realized I had to do something related to art, psychology, and space. I thought perhaps blogging was an outlet. I read that blogs had to have a specialized niche in order to retain an audience. But I kind of broke the rules a bit. I see my blog as a way of three different groups of people getting to know each other. Artists can learn more about psychology. Astronomers can learn more about art. And psychologists can learn more about space. I can also talk about how the three topics overlap.

Anyway, that brings us to the present day. My overall goal is to find a soul-group online. A soul-group is basically a group of people who have similar interests. It is a group of people I can learn from and teach at the same time. My soul group is people who like to bounce around ideas about art, space, and psychology.

That's all I'll write for now. I've said enough about myself. I'll be checking out the posts here to see who is around, what I can learn, and what I can share. I'll get to know the culture around here a bit better :)