Hello Star68,

Though my mother and father especially were very supportive during my childhood, the age gap I have with my brothers was for me as it was for you the main motivator to find friends outside.

Though I did not experience anxiety as a child, young adult, I have developed a health respect for it as a grown up. As one who blindly trusted everybody to treat me as I treated them, I was castaway at a professional and personal level when circumstances led me to take an unambiguous stance to not betray ethics/conscience. Being shunned for not being a person who sways whichever direction people want me to created disparity in trust. After that low-point in my life, I do not wish to revisit the betrayal experienced once before. One may call it anxiety, I call it prudence.

Just as wildlife, I view civil society is made of people with a wide range of intentions and being prudent helps a great deal. Andy Grove of Intel Corporation is a role-model in this aspect, he said "only the paranoid survive", who we take help from and a healthy extrapolation of the consequences has so far kept me on predictable path (steps forwards with no steps back :-).