Anxiety

I've had some form of social anxiety as far back as I can remember.  It manifested itself in many ways but mostly in my pushing people away so that I was safe.  Being a guy I have only the guy tools to do such work so have had very few male friends in my life.   It sounds sad but having mostly female friends has been fine.  

It looks like I'm going to need some employment to create a larger financial safety net.  The nice part is we don't need much and I have a lot of time to both find the right work and to do the work.  So I've been reading the huge number of 'work at home sites' and ran across an article about how work at home resolves the social anxiety part of work.  My stomach relaxed at the thought and I realized how much I really don't like going into a space with a bunch of people, even ones I see every day.  This is magnified exponentially by interacting with people I don't know on a daily basis.  I started a computer service company with some thought to not allowing myself to tolerate what most people would call a weakness.  

My usual mode of operation throughout my life is to find the thing that most puts me off and do it.  Don't like interacting with people?  Start a service company.  That kind of thing.  

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Prolific

I stumbled across Prolific (https://app.prolific.co/) a year ago and in that time have earned about 367.93 pounds.  It is a British site and so I've always got more money than I think once I do the conversion.  The site does surveys for scientific and education studies.  Much of it is people putting together their work for a Masters or Doctorate but some of it is legitimate sociology in action.  The surveys span from the poorly constructed to the complex and relevant, from 'Why do men urinate standing up and how can I make them stop?' (yes, this was couched in what was going to be some kind of thesis) to investments, hiring practices, political thought, video games.  An amazing array of topics people use for their final papers.

Most of the payouts are less than a pound.  Some are more and sometimes it is a couple or three pounds.  But the money typically grows very slowly.  Right now I've got about 82 pounds in the bank that I can transfer anytime I want to PayPal and spend.

So I have long periods of time to decide what to spend it on and I do use a lot of brain cells on that.  I've bought shoes, an Echo Auto and an Echo Show so far.  It is zero guilt spending so it is kind of fun.  But a lot of work.

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Zoe on my pillow looking for belly rubs