After spending four full days cleaning up after a rather vigorous windstorm, collecting and burning many piles of debris, I had a sudden thought: this is what I do on Steemit every day. I do things and my time goes up in flames!
Okay, so spending my time gathering thoughts, organizing, and posting to Steemit so the time involved can go up in flames is not necessarily a bad thing.
Is it?
I'm not sure.
On Steemit, I earned about 29 cents. That's not bad, because of the low market price for the crypto, no one is earning much. Besides, I made a neat new friend, 
Had I been outdoors, as I was yesterday, I would have earned nothing, although I did pick up over 1,300 fallen pinecones, and at least half that many fallen branches and stack them all to be burned. That means bending over, picking up one at a time, putting it in a cart, then transporting, dumping a load, and returning to do it over and over again for the next four hours.
When I got through, I had four smoldering fires, a pile of ashes that would be added to the compost pile, and the absence of scattered debris. In essence: nothing at all visible was accomplished. I also did not make any new friends in the process.
The intangibles count: my quality of life was improved by reducing the clutter, and I had a good workout (try bending and stooping over 2,000 times!)
But the morning also illustrates that there is more to maintaining infrastructure than making a required number of posts and comments every day. Even if you do make them, they slide into the forgotten past after seven days, outside of your revenue stream and into the mist of time past. Plus, while you were so diligently working away, trying to be genuinely creative by adding quality content, other new Steemians were paying bots to super-vote their poor content, increase their reputation score to ridiculously high levels in one week, while another one who has learned how to "game the system" (called cheating, in days past) has posted his 2,400th photo of a flower with no other text than a creative caption that says "FLOWER".
So, I console myself when I'm doing physical, necessary things, that at least I'm being productive and am purging my mind of addictive behavior for at least one day.
Watching things go up in flames can help purify your mind...along with the rest of the debris.
finis
