I'm terrified of marketing and trying to attract customers. Every time your boss annoys you with a "How's it going?" status ping you are forced to sell yoursel

I'm terrified of marketing and trying to attract customers. Every time your boss annoys you with a "How's it going?" status ping you are forced to sell yourself. Granted, there isn't immediate income on the line, but the status fluctuations have ultimate income-altering effects, sometimes with severe nonlinearity (i.e. your slight annoyance at a not-enough-to-do boss's fourth-in-a-day status ping ends up rippling into you getting fired). That's not to say that consulting isn't harder, because it is. There's an established (if hilariously corrupt and inefficient) market for full-time employment. The consulting market is a broken word-of-mouth mess. And you constantly have to fend off the parasitic type of client that wants more leverage over you than he should, by rights, have. (That is, he wants to pay you on an as-needed basis, but have the reputation-impaling power of a boss.) That sucks, for sure, and it's one of the reason why medieval-style reputation economies deserve to die. The fact is, though, that you're already constantly selling yourself as a corporate employee. If you have 27 good months and fall down in the 28th, you'll probably be fired, or at least harassed in some permanent way ("performance improvement plan") that makes it useless for you to keep coming into work; your career there is over. In that context, you're already a freelancer, even if an employee. Sure, freelancing is terrifying but I've seen enough to look past the selling points of employment and realize that it's a form of freelancing that is (a) less selective and therefore easier to get, but (b) designed to pay you just enough to survive, so you can't save for lean times, in the way that a genuine freelancer does (and must).