A Clickwork Orange - The Strange New World Of The Side Hustle
A middle-aged dad wades into the gig economy via Clickworker — one repetitive, oddly humbling task at a time.
Disclaimer: As a middle-aged father of two, I am biologically programmed to make bad puns and dad jokes.
In case you've never seen the Clickworker homepage, this is it:
None of those people are me. There's not a gray hair in the bunch and it appears the only person who doesn't have hair does it by choice – again, that's not me. So, although I am not the "ordinary" or "targeted" Clickworker demographic, I still found it a good place to get my feet wet in side hustling. One thing, though, my side hustle posture was at least similar to these people – my face was in my phone when I had free time.
After my initial start on Clickworker in November 2025, over the next three months or so, this was my side hustle in its entirety – working Clickworker jobs through my phone via their app. (You can find more about Clickworker here.) And I have to say that it was actual work. Not like physical labor kind of work but it was definitely mentally taxing. Study after study of (comfortably anonymously) having to put in various demographic info over and over again, accepting "not being qualified" over and over again, surveys freezing, doing small repetitive tasks for $.01 or $.03, rating AI voices sometimes for periods as long as forty minutes just for $3 or $4, five minute surveys for $.10, ten minute surveys for $.25, etc. No glamour and no big scores - just grind.
It's not well-paid work and it is certainly not easy (respect to anyone using this kind of thing as their primary source of income). But I kept at it.
And I started to think about how to expand.
(You can see the results of these three months here.)