I agree with you, the article seems to be about depression. It starts like it is going to be about lazy troubled, but it suddenly turns into this matter.
To me it makes a lot of sense, because I didn't want to wake up when there was not hope for happiness. What the author says is that adding the duty of waking up early does not help when your life is already bad, it is only one more source of remorse.
TL;DR I grow magic mushrooms myself and can asure there is a mystic experience on eating them. I do not eat them often, but it helps me everytime with a new perspective.
This man was literally inventing modern computing and cryptography. Those papers must be very valuable for collectionists. This reminds me that I got to know recently about the famous Turing test being passed. Amazing. What a vision.
I am in a similar situation to the OP and I'd like to thank you for all your valuable sharings.
For me, it seems obvious that referals are the best way to attract new clients, but there are times when you just don't have them. I agree with most of the comments about freelance sites not being worth the effort, but I want to contribute with my perpective on cold-emailing or cold-anything.
Although I don't have much experience, I found very usefull an advice from the blog of inboundsales.net: the people you contact when you do cold-something are regarded as "suspects" (everyone in your target market). As such, they will not be receptive to invasive sales messages, but they will value your knowledge and will appreciate any great content you are able to share with them, like infographics, non-demo videos, interesting articles about their problems, etc. Then, if they take action, they become "prospects", and so on. It is a kind of science, not easy for us computer geeks. I am starting with this in mind and hope it yields good results.
Apart from the fact of being an interesting article on CV, how would you avoid waiting to checkout to find out the price difference by scanning the barcode?