In your original posting, you say "helping is enough" but clearly it isn't. If it were really enough, you would have your needs met and would not need payment.

In your original posting, you say "helping is enough" but clearly it isn't. If it were really enough, you would have your needs met and would not need payment. So this is perhaps more like someone saying they don't have an appetite and don't want to eat. In the short term, you can follow such a feeling and fast without issues. But if you have a persistent lack of appetite, you eventually either force yourself to eat anyway or you become incapacitated. There is no more logic to it than this. What is the basis of your reluctance to ask for payment? To have recognized the logical problem but still feel "blocked" as you said in another comment here, there must be some other emotional or subconscious context. Unfortunately, we can only make scattered probes into this hidden realm. You have had regular salaried work and would consider going back to it. Would you do that but reject the paychecks? If not, why not? What's different other than the "batching" of the transactions? Do you have anxiety about asking and being rebuffed? Do you have embarrassment about exposing needs of your own? Do you have some magnanimous fantasy you can't let go of? Without knowing you at all, I'd suggest reframing your question as how to find a happy and sustainable income for yourself. The goal is not to work. The goal is to support yourself, and work happens to be the way this is usually done. You know you need income to survive. If you did not need income, then you could focus all your time on hobbies or charity. You know you have some preferences for your work scope. With a stable salaried position, you are in some sense coalescing your payment and work-scope negotiations into less frequent but larger commitment. In another sense, you are delegating the frequent transactional negotiations to your employer who obtains funds and work scope obligations somehow. And in a third sense, you are decoupling the financial and scope negotiations if it is a larger organization where you may enjoy some job stability even while you argue about work scope with your direct management. Does any aspect of this resonates more with you? Maybe you've abandoned something you actually find valuable.