
I first began picking up and tracking change I found in August 2014, then really started getting invested in it the following year.
In 2016, for each day that I found any currency, I took a photo of it and wrote something about that day.
Then I wanted to get a little more interactive, so I tried to develop a project in which I’d replace a coin I’d found with a coin-sized token I’d numbered consecutively. That went bust, because there wasn’t a way for someone who’d found one of my coins to trace it back to the project (and because hammering info into tokens is noisy work unappreciated by roommates, cats, and neighbors).
I was stumped in overcoming these design flaws (and do people even pick up beautiful small things, anyway?), and then I started graduate school, so I felt a little less invested in picking up any change I’d come across, seeing a penny on a subway stairwell, sighing deeply, and passing it by.
Still, I continued to dutifully put the money I’d found into jars, which I’d then organize at the beginning of a new year. Last week I was counting out the 2019 haul, which seemed like a smaller amount of change than I’d accumulated in past years. So I wondered: Was that accurate? What had I picked up over the past five (and change) years? How much was it all worth, and how many individual pieces of US currency had I carried home in my pockets?
I dropped the data into a couple of spreadsheets to find out.