Lately, I have gradually gotten closer and closer to the realization that I have been/am spending my entire life in the business of "gathering crumbs."

I suppose I should expand on that a little bit by adding that I'm mostly talking about financial crumbs.

It was triggered — to some degree, after my realization yesterday that BeeSwap was gone — by the fact that I was using the original Hive-Engine to take a look at my token wallet and recognizing what a vast number of tiny crumbs I have sitting there.

Some of these tokens represent projects that are allegedly still alive, while others represent projects that have fizzled out and basically become worthless... but the tokens are still sitting there, sometimes thousands of them with an aggregate value of less than one cent. So many things gone to nothing...

Even before there was Hive, I suppose I was chasing crumbs. The first crypto I ever owned came as a result of collecting from so-called faucets back then, and what could be a better example of "collecting crumbs" than getting these tiny fragments of coins?

But even before there was crypto, I was collecting crumbs as a result of keeping blogs in the traditional content creation space and telling myself that I was "monetizing them" with Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links... that ultimately ended up earning me the princely sum of maybe a few dollars a month. It often started out much better, but gradually became crumbs.

Before that, I was involved in old fashioned "analog" projects where you could do certain things from home and earn a few dollars as a result. I'm not talking about starting a home business here... I'm talking about sending away for certain things that you could perform as a "task" and send back where you got it from and get paid a few dollars.

In retrospect, I have come to realize that all of it has existed in service of doing my utmost to not feel encumbered by having to have an actual job unless I absolutely had to... or as a way to supplement and make dull low-paying jobs a little more palatable and financially viable to live with.

Now I find myself here on Hive, writing occasional blog posts and making comments around the community — both activities that I really enjoy — in the hope of gathering a few crumbs that might eventually add up to something, even though this pervasive downward spiral is not particularly encouraging.

As I write these words, my Hive wallet "crumbs" are valued at about $73.50 and my Hive-Engine token wallet contributes an additional $44.00 to the total. It's not even half the electric bill!

And that is why I basically consider it "crumbs" and the activity here amounting to "collecting crumbs."

As part of this whole exploration of crumbs, I'm tentatively considering doing a series of posts in which I do a deep dive on each of these crumbs that make up the total. How did they start? What happened to them? Are they still some degree of active? Are we talking about "start it and leave it" projects or projects that have an ongoing effort going into them?

Not sure whether it's worthwhile, nor whether it would have value to anybody but myself, but at least it would keep me entertained for a while!

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

As always, a 10% @commentrewarder bonus is active on this post!

=^..^=