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Read more: The Paradox of Choice and Me in April 2025
It’s been a while since I read The Paradox of Choice, and the book is packed away somewhere, so I’m not going to get the exact statistics and examples right, but they will be close enough. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz looks at scientific studies involving work insurance offerings. The scientists found that when a workplace offered a few choices in insurance, people would sign up. When the business offered lots of choices, people were less likely to sign up. Businesses would offer 100 different insurance options and a high percentage of people wouldn’t choose any of them, even though the insurance was supposed to be a part of their compensation package. The business saved money this way, and people were left without insurance because they couldn’t process enough information to make a good choice.
Paralysis in Decision Making
One factor in the paralysis in decision making comes from the fear of making the wrong choice. You choose an insurance with a high deductible because it also covers overnight ER visits for free, but you never end up in the ER while have to cover the deductible because of other medical issues. You can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and many people would rather not make a decision than make a wrong decision.
Everyday Choices
The medical side of it is sort of an extreme example because this paradox of choice occurs any time there are choices to be made, and we make choices from the moment we get up, and sometimes before. Am I going to hit the snooze button? Am I going to hit the snooze button again? What should I wear? What am I going to have for breakfast?
When we go to the store we are faced with an aisle of cereal choices, soup choices, and other food choices. What are we going to get? Will it be the best deal? Do we decide based on per ounce cost or gross cost? Most of us develop routines to avoid having to make all of the decisions all the time. We run on autopilot. We have favorite brands because we refuse to deviate from them, even if another brand would be a better value or offer a better experience. I have my clothes set up, so I can grab the first thing available in the drawer and wear it. I tell myself, no one cares what I’m wearing, why should I?
How Do I Make Money?
However, the one place where I have problems every day is in the decision on what to do. For those who haven’t been following along, I got laid off in January. I had moved to Eugene, December 16, for a job promotion. I was always taught you move to where the job is. I paid the moving expenses, maxing out my credit cards and depleting my savings, and signed a 12-month lease. On January 16, my job told me my position was eliminated. SURPRISE! Now, I have to scramble to figure out how to make money to pay my bills.
The question I’m faced with every moment of every day is “What can I do right now to make money?” There are a lot of options. Unfortunately, they all seem relatively equal in how much I will make and the amount of effort and time they take.
Previous Experience
I have had previous experience in having to make this type of decision back when I had chosen to be a freelancer. At that time, however, I had a steady income from an SEO writing gig that I could do whenever articles were available, and they were available a lot. I paid a lot of bills through that job because I knew I needed to average eight articles a day to meet my financial obligations. I didn’t have insurance or retirement benefits, but I was younger and toward the end I lived in a country where everyone had insurance, citizen or not. Once I had those eight articles written, I could do whatever I wanted, and I didn’t have any monetary pressure on me. They changed their business model during COVID, and now, I don’t have that cash cow anymore.
What Are My Choices?
Here is a quick list, in no particular order, of what I could choose to do to make money today:
These are all things I could work on to theoretically improve my financial standings. Let’s break each choice down.
InboxDollars
Earlier this year, I published an article about InboxDollars and how to use it. Since then, they have changed the way they payout their cash option. It used to be you could cash out every $10 through Paypal. Now, there is a 30-cent fee. It’s hard to make 30 cents at InboxDollars when you’re just doing the minimum. The 30-cent fee doesn’t change if you cash out at higher levels, but you might just want to get a gift card of some sort and avoid the fee altogether. Waiting until you have accumulated $100 to cashout seems like an eternity. In 2024, it took me about six months to make $100 with InboxDollars.
I have found some deals to speed up the process. They offered $50 if I deposited $20 into a Sofi account. The payout isn’t immediate, but it’s better than double my money. I chose Disney stock for my Sofi account, so it’s not like I spent it (unless Disney stock goes below $0).
I’ve been grinding at the games I can download to my smartphone. (I don’t have a plan; it connects to Internet.) The thing is: These are a grind. I can spend all day pushing my finger against the screen thousands of times and only be in the process of making money without having made any actual money. (And I have.)
Golden Hearts Games and Clubs Poker
These are two gambling sites I found at InboxDollars. If I deposited a certain amount of money, I would get more back. (I don’t recall the exact offer, but it was probably something like deposit $20, get $30 back.) I tried it on Golden Hearts Games first because I was relatively new to InboxDollars. I played the games required, got paid out at InboxDollars, and then got paid out at Golden Hearts Games. I go to Golden Hearts Games every day to get my free spin. I play that money on Old School Jacks or Better, and that’s it. When my counter fills up to $50, I get to redeem for cash. (It used to be $25.)
At Clubs Poker, I play the Great Pigsby. This site requires $100 in credits before it will payout. Again, I don’t spend any of my own money. They offer 50 cents a day for games. You have to play those coins before they can go in the redeem pile.
Both sites offer free coins to play with, too. However, if you have a gambling problem, these sites aren’t for you. Personally, I recommend you finding out if these two offers still exist on InboxDollars before signing up through the links I’ve given you.
Write for Penguinate.com
Penguinate.com is my own website and where this article was originally published. I make a few pennies every month from content I’ve already published. The website has never paid for itself, and I need to hit the $100 mark for my first payout. Currently, I am at $20.97, which includes my highest month of December 2021 at $1.06. Looking at these numbers, I should probably just stop writing, at least for my website. But there’s always the possibility that something I write will go viral. All I need is to serve about a million ads to make it to about $83… Still, I keep pulling that one-armed jack that is blog posting.
Publish on Patreon
I have a small and dedicated group of supporters on Patreon. If I wrote more and put it on Patreon would I be able to grow that audience? I’ve written various posts about Patreon. The quick version is: Patreon allows people to support their favorite artists and creators. I would write with the hope that people would want to support us monthly for my writing and Jenya’s plushie creations. I have already added a way for people to get a free month at the $1 to see what the future of Patreon and creativity look like (Valid until June 29, 2025). I will be releasing one post a month and I have them scheduled through June, but I could write more of them for future months.
Plushies on Etsy
Jenya is making some really incredible plushies and putting them on Etsy. There’s this beautiful, vintage-inspired bunny, some bears, and a penguin or two. Do I need to do more work on advertising that shop? The problem is that we can’t charge enough to cover Jenya’s time for her handmade plushies. The bunny took five days to knit and finish. You can’t charge $500 for it. Maybe we need to come up with something else, but that will mean investing time to learn the new thing and money to get the materials to make the new thing. Seriously, though, if you haven’t seen these new plushies, you should head to our Etsy shop now.
Amazon Affiliate
I am an Amazon Affiliate. I’m not going to rehash the information in the very first part of the post to explain what that means for you. What it means for me is that I could write a bunch of posts on products and use the affiliate link to sell those products. I don’t like doing it, but it may be the only way to get people to use those affiliate links. Right now, I use them for my books and some other odds and ends. My mom has been good about ordering things through the links, but it ends up being about $10 every three months.
Look for a Job
Looking for a job has changed, especially since I’m in a place where I don’t have any contacts. It used to be you could go from business to business, drop off a resume, and get an interview. Until recently, an interview was all I needed to get hired.
Now, you need a cover letter and resume for every job that matches the job description word for word. Businesses aren’t even reading them anymore. They run them through “AI,” and if AI is looking for “managed special events” and the resume says “organized fundraisers,” AI will say that the resume doesn’t match the job description and no human being will ever see the resume. (This is because AI isn’t AI; it’s a mathematical algorithm and a series or preprogrammed responses. AI is incredibly complicated, but it hasn’t mastered the learning part of intelligence.) This means that every resume needs to be done again for every job.
It takes me four hours to do this. That four hours does not include the time it takes to find a job on Indeed, where I have to sift through postings for nurses, physical therapists, mechanics, teachers, even though I told Indeed I do not have the qualifications for those jobs. I also have to sift through jobs that don’t offer benefits or don’t pay enough. I’m too old to take a job that doesn’t offer health insurance and retirement. If I take a job at $17 an hour, I’ll need to work 54 hours a week to make ends meet. In the words of Danny Glover, “I’m too old for this…” I have 20 years until I turn 73. I have $10,000 in my retirement account. There’s no way I can afford to take job that doesn’t offer some sort of 401k. Additionally, there’s no reason I should have to work 54 hours a week to afford food, rent, and a modicum of entertainment.
I know there are some people who are perfectly fine with me taking a job for $5 an hour. It’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make. However, those jobs only put me deeper in debt. We gotta do what we gotta do, but f…
Looking for a Job II
I’m sorry. I got distracted. I have had one face-to-face interview for the hours of work that I put into finding a job. There’s no guarantee that if I find and apply for a job that there will be any benefit at all. I will just have wasted my time.
Contract Work
Luckily, I have two contract jobs I love and one I was trying to get away from. (When I took the bank promotion, I was happy with the idea that I would be able to cut down my workload to one job. I guess I should have been specific about which job.) The one job that I have that actually pays per hour is inconsistent, pays $17 per hour, and offers no benefits. The last two weeks, I had no hours. This coming week, I will have between eight and 12 hours. I’m glad I didn’t give it up when I moved, but it’s not a long-term solution, even if I do get my own regular assignment soon.
Working for Asgard Alaska is great. (You should sign up for their newsletter.) I’m helping friends realize their dreams for a Viking village. I’m learning tons about Viking life. The job is super flexible. As long as we have content for two posts a month, I can do the work I want. They pay well, too. It’s not an endless source of wealth, yet. There’s a limit to how much I can write in a year. Still, it’s nice work if you can get it, and I’m glad I have.
I have a new contract with Bearly Entertaining and their related YouTube channel, StudyFocusBeach. (You should subscribe to their YouTube channel.) Again, I’m going to be helping friends, who are helping me by sending work my way.
These three jobs add up to about 50 hours a month. I would need to find another 150 hours of work to start to feel comfortable financially again.
Write a Book
There are two parts to this, and they are very different. I could spend my time writing another book. I have several ideas. I even have a couple started through 4,000 words. I have one book formatted and ready, except it needs a cover. I have another book that needs formatting and a cover. It takes about a week to format. However, writing a book and getting a cover made (which may or may not have a cost, depending on how I do it), do not mean that the book is going to sell. The last book I published sold 10 copies.
I need to learn how to market my books. I do best when I’m able to sell them in person, but best means 10 books in six hours. There’s got to be something that I’m missing in my marketing piece until I find out what that is, I’m going to be stuck pulling the one-armed bandit lever that is book publishing.
DraftKings and FanDuel
I almost forgot about these two gambling sites. You don’t need to deposit any money, just participate in their free contests. They don’t work in all states. Some contests only offer bonus cash that you then need to use to gamble.
On DraftKings, I’m able to do their pools on Sportsbook and whatever they decide to do on their Fantasy site that’s free. On Fanduel, I will get bonus cash and then play their NBA “Everyone Wins” contest. If you have a gambling problem, these sites are not for you.
I haven’t followed any professional sports enough to know who’s going to be good. I do read the articles each site presents for the game I’m playing. It’s mostly like playing the lottery. You may or may not win. One weekend I wound up with $13. There have been several weekends where I ended up with $1. The payouts are almost immediate and go to my Paypal.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that none of these options, outside of the contract work, is guaranteed to make me any money, and my current contract work isn’t enough to live on. Even if I were able to build enough contract work to make $4,000 a month, it wouldn’t be enough to cover health insurance or retirement. So, how do I choose amongst all these things?
Is Making Money the Only Thing?
Of course, another part of being unemployed at home is that I have other choices to make. Do I take out the trash? Do I sit with the cat? Do I go for a walk because it’s sunny out? Do I read the really interesting book that I want to finish? Do I need another cup of coffee? (Probably yes.) Do I help fold the laundry? (Also probably yes.) How much “work” do I have to do to justify spending time with Jenya, my wife? None of these things will make my bank account healthier. Will they help me destress or will I continue to stress because it appears I’m not making the effort to improve my situation? All of these activities break the flow of any other activity I might have been engaged in, but that’s part of the paradox of choice. Any other choice interferes with the choice you’ve currently made.
What about Stress?
Everything that I need to do takes motivation. There’s no habit built, yet, and that means stress can throw me out of planned day of anything. The news, the economy, what’s happening with immigrants, what’s happening with government employees and their unemployment, my vertigo, my cat gets sick, getting turned down for a job, anything that causes the day to go from okay to awful can make it almost impossible for me to write, to apply for jobs or to do much of anything but sit despondently in fear about the future. I can’t move forward on those days when I’m stuck in the Swamps of Sadness. Even on good days, I question if I’m moving forward at all.
What Choice Should I Make?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I can tell you what I generally do when I’m not wallowing in self-defeat and despair about the state of the world and its politicians. I get up, give my cat Greenies, go to my gaming phone, and start grinding for the next level. I get my casino games out of the way and set up my NBA games and pools if available. I go to InboxDollars and try to get my daily goal met. This could mean cycling through 10 or 15 surveys until I make $1 or maybe a little more. I look at Indeed for jobs and save the ones I’m slightly interested in. I have lunch with Jenya. We go for a walk. I come back and try to apply for jobs, but by this time, I’m usually out of motivation. I try to do something productive. I backslide, and it’s time for dinner and a movie. Between 8pm and 9pm, I come back to the laptop hoping for some good news. Between 9 and 10pm, I head for bed where I read. However, throughout the day, I am constantly second-guessing myself and that energy never returns.
Penguinate! Positive Creativity 