I have been freelancing for 5 years and agree with most of this. Thinking about it all the time is absolutely true, and my clients call me at weird times also.<p>I think you can make more money free-lancing than you can working for someone else if you are good at business development, and although it is difficult to scale, if you have talented friends, building a consulting business in a major metropolitan area (NYC,SF, Chicago) is probably easier than building a startup.<p>It would be mucher harder to do from Italy because of the time difference and a lot of high-paying clients expect you to be on site at least some of the time.