This could be a long post on why I'm leaving, and I'll try to keep it short anyway, but there isn't really a singular reason nor a whole lot of drama to it. In short: I just don't find this very fun anymore. I recently purchased $400 of Hive and powered it up assuming it might bring back some of the spark in it all. After all, I have been here for almost a decade and have spent a stupid amount of time on communities, curation, and of course my own posting. But ten years have almost gone by. And the reality is, I just think it's time to move on to something else. My interests have shifted, crypto has shifted, and people on Hive have come and gone. Sure, this place has a ton of existing problems and some may never get properly addressed. But it has been a lot of fun through the drama and the silliness of it all. In the early days I was a freelance writer that basically quit and entirely moved to writing here. I managed to build a desktop PC before hardware got insanely expensive which kept me more active during those days. I helped pay for medical bills for friends, give money to my struggling mother at the time, and purchased my first camera with Hive earnings.
Again, I could write a whole lot of complaints and all about Hive and where it is or could've been, but I don't want that. Nor is my decision to finally pack it all up due to the broader market or price action of Hive. To be honest, it's mostly due to time. Time is a precious thing. Over the past year I found out my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and after many months and surgeries it was discovered that it is something that cannot be cured. Not a day goes by where I don't think about her and this outcome. The past year has been the hardest of my life, but it's a year that has started to put a lot of things into perspective for me. I'm turning 32 in a few months, and I'm starting to think of the time I may or may not have myself. We never really know, and I can feel the list of many things I want to start doing or have thought about doing starting to pile up. Film and photography has been something I found later on in life, something that has completely devoured my attention. I absolutely love it all, and I believe it's one of the strongest, yet youngest methods of storytelling we have in the world today.
I want to do more with it, and that means focusing more attention and time towards it. Getting out into the world, photographing and filming things. Capturing and telling stories. Creating new connections with other creatives and different people through it. Hive is quite a time sink, I don't know how others can manage it. And as this past year has gone by, I have felt myself slipping away from it all more and more. Where I'd stop posting for days or weeks. And I feared in the back of my mind that it would become something more permanent after sinking so many years and so much emotion into this. I know some people may think and want to say: hey, why not just accept that? Why not let your attention and time go elsewhere and pop back in here every now and then? And to answer it: I'm just not made that way. I devour my attention and time into something, and it all goes there. I wouldn't want that guilt or feeling that I need to come back every so often, or that I should maintain some activity for the sake of it. Especially when I am trying to put my all elsewhere. Ultimately, if something is no longer fun, of interest, or truly speaks to you, why continue? I've even thought about writing a post like this for the longes time, sometimes I even began but had that doubt. I figured now is the best time, to finally get it out there and actually commit.
With all the years spent into trying to build communities on here, I sincerely hope that one day it all pays off for whoever sticks around. While I am going to move on, I wouldn't want Hive to die. It's a piece of my life that I have enjoyed, and I know many others have poured so much time, emotion, and money into things here. To help you all out, any rewards from this are going straight into the fire. Thanks for the fun, thanks for keeping me writing and sharing my photography. Thanks for giving me a platform to write about films to which I discovered my love for it in the first place! I never would have purchased a camera to try it all had I not been writing about films every day here. Farewell!