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Some Population ParadoxesM Gani; Ajax, Ontario; 14 July 2020(Thanks to Sean for the A2A.)There are many crazy facts or paradoxes regarding the human population. A paradox is a reality that defies intuition and hence seems implausible or crazy.This note covers four very striking paradoxes. The first is that as the number of people increased, so did their real income per person, their life expectancy, and their standard of living.The second paradox is that the human success in growing food and non-food items is so excessive that overproduction of food is the main cause of poverty and hunger while over-education to indulge in high-tech professions makes the richer people have fewer children, so few that the population risks going extinct through attrition.The third paradox is that the presence of technology destroys the causal link between the amount of land the number of people who can live on it. Better lands allow larger populations to the point that natural resource impedes development rather than promote it. Too much land producing too much food is responsible for 90% or more of remaining poverty.The fourth paradox is that within any given country, real incomes and standards of living are higher in the more densely packed larger towns than the sparsely populated villages.1. Larger population, bigger real income, longer life, better standard of livingIt is beyond any room for doubt that the number of people could increase only after productivity of people improved to produce more food and more of non-food. In respect of the productive quality of people, one can divide history into four successive regimes: forager, pastoral, agrarian and industrial, in that sequence.Regime - Time before present (BP)- Population- Life expectancy -Average incomeWoodland Forager-200,000-20,000 years BP 25,000 people 25 years $80Grassland Pastoral-20,000-10,000 years BP 5,000,000 people 30 years $200Cropland agrarian-10,000-250 years BP-750,000,000 people-40 years-$500Urban industrial-250-0 years BP -7,800,000,000 people-75 years-$10,000These numbers are suggestive, and more speculative as further back one goes. But these numbers are not arbitrary: they are based on careful analysis of possibilities and balancing of various factors. These are educated guesses, and there is certainly room to seek greater precision. Even with drastic revision, the key fact remains intact: the larger population came with higher per person income and longer expectancy of life and higher standard of living.Anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens, may have emerged some 200,000 years ago. There is very little room for doubt that they lived pretty much like chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutan in the woodlands. They were natural foragers to gather naturally available vegetarian food and hunted natural prey animals. The teeth suggest that they were not much of a meat-eater; and they subsisted mostly on plant-based food.Foragers do not grow any food or breed any animal: they rely on nature to supply the food. The humans are gregarious by nature. The human child is unable to live a solitary life until crossing age 6. This extremely long childhood, longest in nature, made it an imperative that the mother must have regular companions to help her care for the infant. One often overlooked matter is the near constant sexuality of the human mother, who rewards her male companion with sex that has no biological function in reproduction. A pregnant mother needs no sex, but, the human mother is even more receptive to her mate during pregnancy. There is no biological advantage to having a swollen breast before the mother has a child or after the mother has weaned her child. No animal other than the human male is attracted by the breast of the female. All these together suggest that humans evolved a structure of gregarious group-living existence. Sex acted as a key cementing component of the long-lasting companionship. It is estimated that the normal size of the human group would be about 25 individuals of all ages and sexes. But a single forager needs about 15 sq. kilometers of woodland tract to survive throughout the year. Hence a habitat smaller than 400 square kilometers would be abandoned by the group. And then one sees that the entire planet could not have more than 25,000 humans in the peak of the forager era.It is not possible to estimate how the population might have changed during the 180,000 years of the forager regime. One may make various conjectures based on archaeological data so far gathered. Population size fluctuated, but the long-term average may have been very close to 25000 people.The forager people lived precariously on the verge of extinction. All other species of humans did go extinct. They had nothing more than daily hand-to-mouth existence. They got nothing other than raw food. They had no homes. They had no clothes. There were just no manufactured goods at all. There were no services of any kind. It is difficult to imagine them having a per person real income any larger than some 80 dollars in 2020 values, remembering that the foods they ate did not contain any cost of transport or storage or intermediation. At realistic prices at which people sell foods at farm gates, this is a very likely figure.But once again, the precise number of dollars is not an issue. Even with a drastic revision, it must still be true that the world was the poorest when it had the smallest population.At present, the world gets less than 4% of its income from natural resources, not just from trees, but from minerals as well. Even if we suppose that ancient foragers could have exploited woodlands, it still must mean that they could not have earned any more than 2% of what people earn today. They would not be able to grow any food from land, or to get any milk or meat from domesticated animals or catch much of fish with bare hands, and surely they got nothing from minerals.The hope that they might live on average as many as 25 years seems too optimistic. Even peasants in historical times did not live much longer. They were splintered into isolated groups of about 25 individuals, and the so-called herd immunity could have hardly made any impression in the face of viral and bacterial attacks.Something extraordinarily unusual must have happened probably some 20,000 years ago, most likely somewhere near modern middle east or central Asia. No chimpanzee or gorilla or orangutan or any other hunting animal is known to feed and protect a prey animal. Yet it must have been the case that some mad human decided to capture and feed and protect a herd of goats, let them grow big and breed more kids. The man learned how to drink the milk of the goat. People somehow learned to domesticate fowls as poultry birds, and several land animals like pigs and sheep and cows, camels, horses, buffalos and so on.The art of animal husbandry allowed people to permanently increase the supply of protein-rich meat, milk and egg, with a regular option to use their hides and bones. This art was not easy to spread as people lived in isolation. But in about 10,000 years, the human population increased to about 5 million, when another momentous event happened: people learned to breed plants.An unanswered question involves learning when people began to use salt as a regular ingredient in their foods? Did this practice help them lose body fur, and develop better cognition and linguistic ability? Could more protein and salt improve the people biologically? Is it likely that cooking meat and vegetables turned them into regular users of salt?There is no room for doubt that the pastoral people not only had more food than before, they were also more likely to have cloth, especially made of hides. Their quality of life must have improved, as they somehow learned the art of making tents as they ventured into the open grasslands, they were compelled to make regular use of fire for roasting the meat, and eventually to bake pots and pans and even bricks. They might have used campfire to keep off predatory big cats that prowled on them.They learned cooking. The women had opportunities to observe the growth of plants from the seeds they once discarded. All told, it is highly likely that their real income per person was higher than the earlier foragers, and on average they might have lived 5 extra years on account of a more protein rich diet.The invention of agriculture some 10000 years ago was a very earth-shattering momentous event. The floodplains were never a place for the humans at all. And yet they ventured there, made permanent homes, grew enormous harvests, and raised even bigger herds of cattle and goats and pigs and sheep. In addition to be a source of meat and milk, they now could use the cows and buffalos and horses to pull their plows and carts.The agrarian era invited organized armed robbers who looted the granaries and took the peasants as prisoners and slaves. Kings herded many strangers together under one set of rules and a society began to emerge among strangers, who were naturally always at war, but now brought under superior command to exist peacefully according to laws imposed by the armed rulers. A massive surplus was allocated to many types of public goods such as roads and canals, and places of worship and festivities. Writing was invented, and various kinds of industrial products were made with manual labor and simple hand tools. Organized and specialized sciences emerged to deal with many issues of weaponry and warfare and transport and housing and medication and so on.There is no doubt that the human population increased enormously during the agrarian era. There is no doubt that they had more plant-based and animal-based food than any time in previous regimes of existence. They were certainly richer. At the end of this period, they may have reached a global average life expectancy close to 40 years, with great many advances in medicines and health care.They had houses now. They had some clothing, and a variety of hand-made industrial products. They also could have enjoyed transport by riding horses and camels, by riding carts and ships. They used elephants to carry people and logs. There is no doubt that their quality of life was far better than their predecessors.When the industrial revolution struck, it just made everything better. Agrarian people did figure out how to harness wind energy by hoisting sails to pull their ships and boats. They also figured out how to arrest free-flowing water to run water wheels to run their mills to grind grains. And they had long learned the art of using fire to reshape metals of all kinds. But when they invented machines to do work of monstrous energy, they just outdid their imaginary superheroes. No great mythical hero would be able to do as much as an ordinary factory worker who ran machines. The driver of a train or a truck outdo the great mythical heroes.The industrial revolution revolutionized agriculture in many ways, far beyond simple mechanization. They used chemical fertilizers and pesticide. They used genetic engineering and selective crop and animal breeding. The yield per acre increased unbelievably. The same Bangladesh that could produce only about 1.4 million tons of food grain in 1680 could produce 60 million tons in 2019, even after losing a quarter of the land to rural housing. Irrigation alone made a huge difference in yield. Then several breakthroughs occurred, collectively known as the green revolution. Though the global population increased from about 750 million to about 7800 million in just a quarter of a millennium, their real income exploded beyond imagination. Food production in 2019 reached an incredible 2.72 billion tons, enough to feed 13.6 billion people.Per capita income in 2019 exceeded 10,000 dollars (closer to 11000 dollars). Life expectancy crossed 75 years. They have far greater education, much better housing, far more comfortable and speedier transportation, and incredibly more advanced communication. They enjoy enormous range of services never available before. The world is incomparably more just and egalitarian now than at any other time in history. Slavery and cannibalism are at a minimum. Women and lower classes enjoy far more rights now than they did in the agrarian era.All told, the world has seen population numbers to increase, but even more so their quality of life.2. The Penalty of successThe ability and willingness to manipulate the forces of nature through animal husbandry and then agriculture and then machines led man to perhaps too much of success, with unexpected backlash not yet fully grasped.The big penalty of success comes in two ways. The first is that overproduction of food penalizes the food growers by making them poorer. 90% of the world’s poor would not be poor if they did not stay in villages to produce small amounts of food by inefficient technology. This occurs in sub-Saharan Africa and some pockets of southern Asia, where the bulk of the remaining poor (600 million poor out of 7800 million people) are concentrated. The second penalty is that the upper rich professionals are unable to spare the time to raise enough children to reproduce themselves: the fertility rate has fallen below replacement in all high-income economies. If one likes, this is the result of overproduction of education.Intensive cultivation: Had there been no technological breakthrough like the green revolution, more people would need extensive cultivation to grow the food. But there was a tremendous pressure to innovate during the long agrarian era. To do the hard work of farming, there was never enough labor and the perpetual labor shortage (underpopulation) brought the ugly reality of slavery. One should think seriously to determine whether slavery was an expression of underpopulation or not. The ruling class wanted more and more land to be tilled but had to resort to slavery to compel people to do the work. The slave owning family should have only as much land as family labor could till. But they bought salves to till more land.The perpetual labor shortage forced people to find ways to do the back-breaking hard work of farming, including the transportation of the bulky produce. When the machines came, the farmers were eager to buy tractors and pumps and trucks rather than slaves. The never-ending demand for farm machinery spawned a specialized industry of engineers ending in intensive cultivation through green revolution, that is growing more crops from the same old land rather than bringing more land under cultivation.People in sub-Saharan Africa, and in rural India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan remained anchored in small farms, even as the wage rate in farms is less than 40% of that in the towns for the same kind of labor in most places. While peasants of developed nations by and large left the villages because farming is the only sure route to perpetuation of poverty, those in the poor countries still have to make the transition to the town and non-farm work. Meanwhile, they must bear the penalty of food overproduction in the form of food prices far below the marginal cost of production.The continuous deterioration of the terms of trade (the decline in the real price of food relative to non-food items) were clearly documented and analyzed in the 1950’s with no awakening among the public at all. Against all sense, people have called for rural development.The American farmers are luckier than the others in the less developed nations, because their political power enables them to get a decent price for the food, which the government is obliged to buy from them under Public Law 480, then dump the same at negative prices on the poor nations. The food is free, and the Americans pay for the shipping, local storage, and distribution. The local farmers in the nations receiving American food aid have no political power. They are bound to sell the food at prices far below the cost of production and thus become poorer. Despite the growing volume of output, agriculture everywhere is losing its share of GDP. Worldwide, it took less than 4% of the income. In 1750, it would have taken 96% of the GDP. People are too good at producing food, and they must suffer for their indulgence in sheer wastage of labor in the production of excess food.Many people may be shocked to learn that worldwide, more than 92% of the hungry people are in fact food producers. Landless farm workers, small and marginal farmers, fishermen and trappers earn to little to be able to get enough food, including the food they must sell in order to by cloth and soap and medicine and haircut and such things.Below replacement fertility: More than 90% of the things used by people in 2020 were simply not known in 1750: they just did not exist. There was no electricity and no electrical equipment or service. There was no telecommunication and hence no communication equipment. There was just no digital device at all. Most of today’s medicine and items of everyday use were not invented before 1750. There were no motorized vehicles, and the goods and services that come with those.The success of technology to invent so many things made it possible for people to go to schools and learn the new techniques to get into high paying modern professions. But going to college meant delaying marriage, and that meant a sharp fall in the number of children per mother. But even after college, the mothers sought to build careers and had little time available to bear and care for children. The cost of childcare became excessively high as urban families nucleated. The older generations of grandmothers to take care of the grandkids was no longer available. Everywhere on earth, the urban fertility rate fell sharply among the professionals. The paradox made its entry: higher real income meant lower number of children per mother. This is reversing the explosive growth of population with a looming threat that the population may start declining after 2100 or may be even from as early as 2070. The population is still growing because there are still poor people who have more kids than are required to replace them. But the percentage and the number of the poor have been sharply falling, and the global fertility has been falling continuously since 1965. The population exploded and then began to fizzle.3. How land became a burden?The earth has a surface of 51 billion hectares, of which about 15 billion is land, of which 14.3 billion hectares are ice-free, of which 3.1 billion are perfect for growing crops, of which 1.4 billion is currently in use, from which in 2019 the food grain output was 2.72 billion tons that could feed 13.6 billion people. The actual world population is only 7.8 billion in 2019, but by 2100, it may reach the peak of 10 billion. Hence currently there is a 75% overproduction of food from less than 10% of the earth’s land. Much of the land under cultivation is used inefficiently. If the best current farming techniques are used, 10 billion people can be fed from just 0.2 billion hectares of land, effectively leaving 98% of the earth’s land untouched. If all the arable land (3.1 billion hectares) is used with best practice tech, 155 billion people can be fed. There is just no chance ever of the human population becoming even 10% of that size. It is certain that more than 90% of the land of the earth will never be needed. There is just too much of it.As the proverb goes, too much of anything is bad. People surely need water, but not when it arrives in floods. They need land, but not when they are imprisoned by it to continue growing crops even when the demand is missing.The key economic point is to see that everywhere on earth, and for longer than the last 2 centuries, the real wage of farm labor is far below that of non-farm labor in towns, for the people of the same skill level. All factors of production, be it land or labor or capital, are less productive in villages than in towns, anywhere on earth.Intensive cultivation has made land more and more redundant so that at some point, land became a net burden. Every country rich or poor, must subsidize agriculture to do the wrong thing: allocate excessively large number of people to do the farming work of declining worth. For example, out of about 165 million people in Bangladesh, roughly 100 million live in villages and generate no more than 14% of GDP, while the other 65 million live in towns and earn no less than 85% of the GDP. What are so many people doing in the villages: except for the adult females who must cook and clean every day? The males basically enjoy 300 days of vacation a year, because work in the farm is sporadic and acutely seasonal. Too much labor is wasted to produce too little.At the same time, there is severe underproduction of homes. Villagers live in homes that are rarely habitable. Had they moved to new areas where they make urban housing to live, the misallocation of massive amounts of labor would be largely corrected. The biggest barrier to moving to town is the high cost of urban housing owing to severe under-construction. The solution is crying to be noticed: remove the excess labor from the villages and put them into the construction of new houses in newly planned cities.A barren tract of desert land that produces nothing is surely not the same as another that yields gold when dug. Yet common intuition seeks to imagine a simple link between the amount of land and the number of people that can live there. The notion of carrying capacity and of sustainability come from such a primitive postulation. But is it thoroughly false? There is just no causal relation between the size of the land surface and the number of people who can live there. The terms ‘carrying capacity’ or ‘sustainability’ have no operational meaning.Compare Russia and Bangladesh. Russia has 116 times the land of Bangladesh but produces only 2.09 times the food that Bangladesh does (in 2019). It means that per square mile of land, Bangladesh produces 56 times more food than Russia does. Similarly, Canada has 68 times the land of Bangladesh, but produces only 1.46 times the food, meaning that from the same amount of land area, Bangladesh gets 46 times more food than Canada does. This this kind of cross-country variation, there is just nothing to make a link between the amount of land and the number of people that can be fed. Indeed, the most fertile croplands are scattered in a few places along the deltaic formations of great river basins. The deltaic formation of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Huang Ho Rivers et cetera have always been densely populated just because these are the most fertile lands.The idea of carrying capacity is supposed to mean the number of people that the land can support indefinitely. It makes no sense, because technology makes this a highly variable number. Here is a rather bizarre story. Bangladesh is a floodplain that annually goes under water for nearly 3 months, no human or cattle can be alive under water for three months, hence the carrying capacity of Bangladesh for people and cattle must be zero. But in 2019, Bangladesh had a human population of about 165 million and cattle population of 24 million. How? People did a simple thing: they dug ponds and piled the soil to make homesteads that stay above the floods, where they keep themselves and their cows dry, who are fed on dried food. And the people, and their cattle merrily ride boats to mock the flood water.The planet’s proven carrying capacity was no more than 25000 people, for 180000 years. That by manipulating the forces of nature through technology of animal husbandry, plant cultivation, and machining people exploded production simply means that the term carrying capacity cannot have meaning. If one insists, one must say that at best-practice food production technology already proven in 2020, the world can indefinitely carry 155 billion people, nearly 20 times larger than the actual population. The actual population will never reach even 10% of that. The trouble: though the world could carry many more, the mothers do not like to breed so many. My brother-in-law a multimillionaire definitely can feed several kids, but it seems unlikely that he will carry any more than the one child he has. There is nothing to make the earth carry the max that it can carry. The idea of carrying capacity flounders because there is nothing to operationally define and determine it. It is as meaningless as asking: how big a ship can the sea bear (keep afloat) or how big a plane can stay flying in air?Land occupies space and that imposes a serious cost of distance: the cost of travel, transport and transmission. If by some magic, if 90% of the unused land could be pushed aside, humanity would greatly reduce the cost of travel and transport. Useless Land has become a net burden because while it gives nothing of benefit to the people, it imposes a massive cost of distance on them. The recent clash between India and Chinese military over patches of useless tracts of land exposes the absurdity: both nations are desperate to sacrifice human lives to maintain their claim of sovereignty on the utterly useless tracts of land nobody will ever have any reason to use. How much saner it would have been if the United Nations could persuade India and China to jointly donate the land to the UN for nature conservation, making it open to anybody who would bother to visit the animals down there. But there is no chance that sane thinking will prevail.Animal lovers have coined the term sustainability without ever defining it. The extremely vague theme is that somehow the level of income is connected to the good health of the environment. This is just a more convoluted term than that of carrying capacity. Nobody has provided any sense of how the environment is linked to the level of production or consumption. Since the global share of nature in GDP is less than 4%, any link between income and nature must be less than 4%. How does the income from singing and dancing and filming, of education and healthcare and entertainment and service depend on environment? Can it be the case that how well a teacher can teach depends on how many good trees exist in the school compound? How can 96% of output that has no dependence on nature be linked to the natural environment?Production and consumption generate waste, and decent humans always clean up after themselves. Apart from personal hygiene, there can be legally mandated standards of cleanliness to ensure that nobody gets to pollute the air or water or the soil or disrupt the normal functioning of wildlife. People have raised billions of cows and hundreds of millions of goats and sheep and billions and billions of poultry birds. They have kept hundreds of millions of cats and dogs as pets. They have set up thousands of zoos. The useful idea is to develop entertainments for people to come and visit animals. That requires more development, not less. It is not really a bright idea to suppose that just by reducing the number of people, they will become kinder and gentler to animals and plants.Poorer people certainly mistreat animals and plants. Poorer people did let plants die during droughts: they did not bother with irrigation. They did not feed starving animals at all: the ate them when they could. The idea that somehow if people can cut down their consumption, they can give more food to the plants and animals is preposterously absurd. The more feasible program of action is to start asking the richer people to patronize zoos and orchards and nature reserves.The fear that too many people will exhaust the natural resources needed for human survival is an extraordinarily lame one. Paul Ehrlich lost his bet to Julian Simon on this issue, because the fear of exhaustion is indeed overblown. The theme that people are destroying the environment and causing disastrous climate harms are extremely over blown. Ehrlich, for example, never had any idea how India might increase food production with the green revolution So in 1968, he predicted that the Indians would starve to death by 1980. He just never had the respect to the people and their problem solving capacities, and the fact that India sits atop the second largest tract of arable land on earth (about 160 million hectares that at best practice can feed 8000 million people, although current actual food production in India is far below best practice). The idea that continuous tilling of soil makes it poorer over time is purely absurd: Egypt has been tilling the same land for about 9000 years, and the yield per acre has been increasing, not decreasing. In short, the fear of resource exhaustion is not based on facts and analysis of facts, but just pure imagination.Anybody who takes the time to read the history of technology and are informed of the many ways people are trying to solve problems will be cheerfully hopeful that better technology and larger real income will allow people to make the earth greener and more livable.4. The paradox of urban densityEconomy of nearness is a neglected fact of life. For any traded object, the distance between the place of production and the place of consumption imposes a cost of covering the distance: somebody must do the travel either to fetch or to deliver the product. The economy of nearness simply means that a smaller distance between the producer and the consumer keeps the cost of delivering the product lower. It appears that most people simply do not recognize how severely important this element of cost is. Many will be startled to hear that for the most commonly used grocery items, transaction cost may be as much as 85% of the price the ultimate consumer pays. And the transport cost takes a relatively large share in this. Just by minimizing the cost of distance, one may save nearly one-third of his or her real expenditure. Its overwhelming significance drives the relentless move towards the cities.The great concentration of all kinds of goods and services in near locations, plus the economies of scale and scope drive the urban agglomeration. People who live in densely populated large cities are not fools. They knowingly pay high rents for space in the cities, because they enjoy the tremendous economies of nearness and makes life far more livable and enjoyable.The result is that the wage rates for the same person is much higher in larger towns than in small villages, for the same kind of work. Thousands and thousands of professions are simply not viable in sparsely populated villages. No village with a population of 200 can set up a filming studio or run a newspaper or TV show.Hence the paradox. The more densely populated places offer more numerous jobs and at higher real wages. This is true everywhere on earth.The villages have become obsolete because people want urban goods and services that take up 96% of their income. Only 4% comes from the village. People want education. A place that has no full-fledged university is not worth living. A place without a full-fledged hospital is not worth living. People want entertainment. A place without a theater or concert hall, without a stadium or a zoo or a museum is not worth living. People settled in the cities do not go back to the villages for the sane reason: such a move is bound to make life less interesting and less productive.People may go on vacations in sylvan unhurried locations. But they can survive there for a short duration. They cannot live all their lives down in the beach or on Mount Everest. Do pilgrims visiting holy sites generally decide to settle down in the holy place?

Fivver. Freelance sitesPros and cons of freelance digital marketingNow that you’re up to speed on the different types of digital marketing, let’s discuss the pros and cons of freelancing in this industry.ProsFirst up, here are the pros:You have no bossYou can decide when you want to workYou can decide where you want to workEvery project is different; you’ll never get boredYou get to decide how much you earn — your pay isn’t restricted by some lame rule that says that salary increments are capped at a maximum of 5% per year.There are plenty of digital marketers who travel the world while freelancing. Heck, you can work while reclining on a lounge chair in a private villa in Bali (as long as the Wifi’s decent). On the flip side, freelance digital marketing is also a great fit for, say, stay-at-home parents who want to earn some extra dough. You can work from the comfort of your own home, and can scale your hours back and forth to suit your schedule!Now, there are a million and one freelancing opportunities out there, so let’s talk about the specific advantages that you get when you’re in freelance digital marketing. We know this is a bold statement, but we’re going to go on the record and say that digital marketing is pretty much recession-proof. As a digital marketer, you’re in the business of driving demand — and that’s something that every business relies on to survive.If times are tough, what do you think will happen? Yes, your client might have to cut back on their marketing budgets, but that cut is likely to come from (non-digital) advertising and PR, not digital marketing. After all, digital marketing allows companies to drive sales and track their ROI more effectively than other forms of marketing, so don’t worry; your job (or side gig!) is safe.ConsThat said, there are several cons of freelance digital marketing as well. These include:Competition is stiff. Assuming you’re going to reach out to clients on freelancer platforms (more on this in a bit!), you’ll have to stand out among all the other freelancers from around the globe.You have no fixed income. You might earn $5,000 one month, and then $500 the next. As you build your client base and get more retainer jobs, the situation should improve, but you still won’t get as much stability as you would with a regular 9 to 5 job.No one’s going to sponsor you to upgrade your skills. Things change really quickly in the digital world, and you can’t rely on your company to send you for courses or workshops that will help you upgrade your skills. Luckily, there are a ton of free online resources that you can make use of.A day in the life of a freelance digital marketerSay you’re freelancing on the side, and you spend weekday nights and weekends working on your freelance digital marketing assignments.Getting started with freelance digital marketingReady to get started with your freelance career? This 6-step guide will help you do just that!Step 1: Manage your expectationsYes, digital freelance marketing can be an amazing career, but it’s not an easy road to get there, and you’ll definitely encounter challenges along the way.Let’s talk about managing stress, for instance. One misconception that many people have about digital freelance marketing (and about freelancing in general) is that it’s a stress-free job. Unfortunately, that’s far from the case. While you don’t have a boss or manager breathing down your neck, you’ll still have to answer to your clients.What happens when you commit yourself to too many things at once, then realize that you can’t hit your deadlines? Or if your client suddenly changes the project scope, wasting days of your time? Your work will never be stress-free, and you’ll just have to learn how to deal with these unexpected scenarios that crop up.Last but not least, understand that it will take you some time to build up momentum; you won’t land your first job right off the bat. It can get pretty disheartening when you’re applying for jobs every single day without hearing back from anyone — but all you can do is grit your teeth, and stick it out. Once you build up your portfolio, and you get some testimonials on your website or online profile, you’ll find it much easier to get new clients.Step 2: Identify your talents and skill setsIn step two of the process, you’ll have to sit down and make a list of the skills you have. Do you know how to run a PPC campaign on Google AdWords? Do you have experience managing Facebook pages? Do you know how to create an automated email campaign on MailChimp?Next, think about other talents and soft skills that you possess. Are you a great storyteller? Do you like problem-solving, and identifying strategies? Do you have expertise in any particular industry?Step 3: Find a nicheOnce you’ve identified your talents and skill sets, the next step is to choose your niche. One huge mistake that many newbie freelancers make with this step? They aren’t specific enough.For instance, many freelancers will decide that they want to cater to startups and small business owners. There are plenty of clients who fall within this category, so if you target them, this means you’ll increase your chances of landing a job, right?Nope — it doesn’t quite work that way. Think about it: the clients you’re reaching out to might all be small business owners, but they’re in different industries, they have different target audiences and products, and they’re gunning for different goals. There’s no way you’ll be able to tailor your pitch to be hyper-targeted and relevant to your clients, and you’ll have a difficult time convincing them that you can do a good job of marketing their businesses.Narrowing Down Your NicheInstead of sticking with a general niche, narrow down your niche, and choose something more specific. You can do this by asking yourself the following questions:How big is the company (in terms of number of employees, or revenue)What industry is the company in?Where is the company located?On top of defining your niche in terms of your target audience, do also think about the type of services you want to offer.Obviously, your skill sets will influence what services you can offer. If you don’t have any experience running PPC ads, for example, you can’t do Search Engine Marketing! On top of that, consider how much time you can commit to your freelance digital marketing, and how you’d like to structure your day as well.ExamplesHere’s an example: if you want to do social media marketing or run AdWords campaigns for your clients, then you won’t be able to travel or take a break as and when you’d like. Sure, you can schedule your client’s social media posts in advance, but you’ll still have to reply to enquiries as and when they come in.How about AdWords campaigns? These are also pretty “high-maintenance” — you’ll have to check in on them and optimize your ads regularly. If you’re running ads for an eCommerce store, your client will probably run promotions during holidays and festivities, so they’ll need you to be around during these periods.If you want to have more flexibility with your time, we recommend doing ad-hoc projects such as SEO work. With SEO, for example, you might optimize your client’s existing blog articles or website pages to rank on Google. Once you’re done with the project, you’re done — your client might re-engage you for subsequent SEO work, but you won’t have to keep checking in on your existing project and tweaking it.Combine Niche and TypesNow that you’ve decided on who you want to serve, and what type of digital marketing you want to do, you’ll probably have identified a niche that’s more narrow. This might be:Social media marketing for FMCG brands in AsiaContent marketing for SaaS platforms in the USSEO strategy for healthcare companies in AustraliaAlright, time to move on to the next step of the process!Step 4: Develop a personal brandMany newbie freelancers think that the key to becoming a successful freelancer is being great at what you do. Unfortunately, this is only part of the puzzle. Capability aside, you’ve also got to develop a personal brand, so you can stand out from all the other freelancers out there.How do you want your clients to describe you?How do you come up with your personal brand? Simple. Just think about how you want your clients to describe you, and go from there.Say I want my clients to think of me as someone who’s innovative and unafraid to push the boundaries. To communicate this, I might do a few things, including:Designing a snazzy-looking website (or getting someone to do it for me)Use an AI scheduling tool to set up meetings with clients, instead of doing it manuallyMake sure my proposals and pitches involve newer, more game changing strategies rather than tried-and-tested methodsWhat if I want my clients to think of me as someone who has a lot of expertise, and brings a lot of value to the table? I’d probably do the following:Blog regularly about latest industry trendsLook for guest post opportunities on websites within my industryWrite an eBook which I can disseminate to potential clientsAdd some personalityWhen you’re creating a personal brand, don’t be afraid to showcase your personality. It’s important to convey a sense of professionalism, sure, but you don’t want to come across too “corporate” or robotic. At the end of the day, you want your potential clients to come away from their interactions with you thinking, “Wow, this person is really cool. I’d love to offer them a freelance marketing project!”Showcasing your personality aside, make sure you also communicate your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) with your branding. This sounds like a fancy term, but it just refers to whatever sets you apart from your competition.If you’ve worked in a prestigious company such as Salesforce, for example, that’s memorable, and you can use that to your advantage. If you’re trying to brand yourself as “100% reliable” or “Never misses a deadline”, on the other hand, that won’t work. Being prompt and adhering to deadlines is a basic requisite that all freelancers should fulfill, so it doesn’t make sense to incorporate this into your branding.Brand logosBefore we move onto the next step, here’s a branding-related question that we get a lot: is it necessary for me to create my own logo and freelance marketing website?Here’s our take: creating your logo is definitely unnecessary. It’s a nice touch, and if you can get it done quickly, go ahead by all means. But if you’re going back and forth on what your logo should look like, and you’re losing sleep over it, then just ditch it altogether. It’s not going to impact your chances of getting digital freelance marketing assignments.WebsitesHow about creating your own website? We do recommend that you take some time to set this up — there are plenty of website builders which are both free and simple to use, and these don’t require any HTML knowledge or coding skills. That said, it’s not important to get your freelance marketing website up and running right off the bat.Why is this the case? Well, when you’re starting out, you’ll probably rely on freelancer platforms, and you can display your portfolio and body of work within those platforms. Once you get more established and your clients start referring other companies to you, though, having your own freelance marketing website will definitely come in handy.Step 5: Look for clientsThere are a few ways in which you can market your services and look for clients; we’ll go through each method in detail in this section.First, what most freelancers do is rely on platforms such as Upwork. Basically, this is where companies go to outsource certain tasks to freelancers. Once you register for an account, you’ll be able to view the job ads posted by companies, send in proposals, and hopefully land yourself your first digital freelance marketing assignment.Pros of using Upwork:There are 5 million registered clients on Upwork, so there’s a ton of freelance jobs for you to choose from.You can check out the profiles of your potential clients, and see what other freelancers say about working with them.The platform comes with features to help you track your progress and get paid. If you’re working on a hourly-rate job, your clients are automatically invoiced and billed for your hours at the end of every week. If you’re working on a fixed-price job, your client has to deposit the amount agreed on with Upwork before you start. In the event that they go MIA, you’ll be able to recover the sum of money from Upwork.Cons of using Upwork:There are 12 million registered freelancers on Upwork (and counting!) — that’s a lot of people that you’re competing with.Upwork takes a cut out of all your contracts (this starts from 20%, but it drops as you hit certain revenue milestones).All in all, Upwork is by no means a perfect platform or solution, but it’s still a great way of connecting with potential clients, especially when you’re first starting out.To maximize your results from Upwork, check out these resources:How to create a rockstar Upwork profile that attracts clients in drovesTop 10 Upwork proposal tips: How to win Upwork jobs in 20188 surprising Upwork proposal mistakes I see every day (and how to avoid them)How to land your first job on UpworkJob SitesFreelancer platforms aside, you can also check out traditional job sites, and reach out to companies hiring for full-time digital marketing positions.Yes, these job ads are for full-time positions, but you’d be surprised at how many of these companies are open to working with freelancers as well. After all, when a company outsources work to a freelancer, they get to save on onboarding costs, office space, training costs, plus benefits and taxes.If you want to give this a shot, here’s a template you can use:Hi Team {Company Name},Nice to e-meet you! I saw your job ad for the {Digital Marketing} position, and wanted to reach out to ask if you’re open to hiring freelancers to help with your digital marketing efforts.I’m an experienced freelance digital marketer who specializes in {skill set}. I’m familiar with {platform/tool}, and I’ve helped companies such as {Company Name} achieve {result}.Please get in touch if you’re keen to explore. Looking forward!Best, {Name}.http://www.linktoportfolio.comPros of using traditional job sites:The space is a lot less crowded, and you have less competition.Cons of using traditional job sites:Some companies might not be open to working with freelancers.There’s more risk involved — you might work on a project for a company, and then end up not getting paid. (To protect yourself, we recommend charging 50% upfront and collecting the second half of your payment upon completion of the project.)Other platformsYour last option is to promote your services on social networks and forums such as Facebook, Quora, and Reddit.Now, this is a tricky one — with platforms such as Quora and Reddit, you can’t outrightly plug your services; doing so will get you banned. What you can do, however, is to answer other users’ questions on digital marketing, and link to blog articles or case studies that you’ve published on your website / LinkedIn profile. The goal is to focus on providing value for the other platform or forum users; assuming you do this right, you should get some potential customers enquiring about your services in time to come.Here are some relevant resources to check out:How to Market Yourself on Quora Without Getting Your Account FlaggedA Content Marketers Guide To Success On RedditStep 6: Figure out how much to chargeIf you’re new to the world of freelancing, you might get a couple of companies approaching you and asking you whether you’d work in return for exposure. You should always reject these offers; the following comic explains why…The only instance in which you should work for free is if it’s for a highly reputable company that you want to be associated with. If you see that MailChimp is hiring a freelancer to manage their Facebook page, for example, there’s no harm approaching them and telling them you’d be happy to take on the project at zero cost. After all, if you tell your subsequent clients that you’ve worked with MailChimp, they’ll know that you’re definitely legit.Now that that’s clear, let’s go on to talk about how you determine what you should be charging.Look to the marketFirst things first, have a look at what other people are charging for similar services. You can either check out other freelancers’ profiles on Upwork, or look at postings on job boards and forums. It’s a good idea to not stray too much from this figure, at least when you’re first starting out. After all, you don’t have much experience; your first few clients won’t have any reason to pay you a premium.Hourly RateOnce you have a general idea of how much you want to charge, calculate your hourly rate based on your full-time income and take that into consideration as well. Say you’re working as a marketing executive, and you earn $3,500 per month. Assuming that you work 8 hours per day, and you’re off on weekends, this means you’re making approximately $22 per hour. Take this to be your baseline, and try not to price your freelance digital marketing services below this amount.How to chargeNow, that’s not to say that you can only charge per hour. Other options include charging a fixed price per project or a retainer price. Let’s break down each option:Fixed price projects:Your client pays you a fixed price per project completed.Best used with projects with fixed scopes and deliverables. If you’re managing your client’s Facebook page, for example, be sure to clarify if they just want you to post to their page, or whether you have to also handle customer enquiries that come in through their page.If you work quickly and productively, you might earn more from fixed price projects than hourly projects. Your clients are paying you based on the value you provide, not the number of hours you put in!Retainer projects:Your client pays you a fixed price per month, and they’ll reach out to you with various tasks over the course of the month. If you’re a small business marketing consultant or a freelance marketing consultant, for example, a retainer project would be a good fit.Your workload will fluctuate based on the client’s schedule / busy periods, but you’ll get paid the same amount per month.This is a great way of “locking in” a client for the long-term; that said, it’s pretty difficult to get retainer clients when you’re first starting out.BONUS: Useful tools and resourcesAs a freelance marketer, there are plenty of tools and resources that you can equip yourself with. Some of these will help you reduce the time you spend on administrative tasks, and others will help you tackle certain aspects of your marketing projects. To increase your productivity and supercharge your digital marketing efforts, check out these tools:Generating leads / getting more clients:SEOptimer’s own Embeddable Audit Tool to generate SEO and website improvement related leads directly from your siteHotjar to help you analyze and optimize your websiteSumoMe to help you grow your email listWix to create a websiteWorking on marketing projects:Pixabay for royalty-free imagesCanva for social media templatesBlog Title Generator to help you come up with headlinesHemingway to improve your writingInvoicing and billing:Bonsai to generate freelance contractsHarvest to generate client invoices

Brain/Mind as Broken ToolOK! What happens is the brain can’t get over the anxiety, so the brain becomes like a broken tool trying to fix something… by… focusing on it and the worst case scenario’s- how to prevent them and fix the problem. The problem is that it, the brain, is a broken tool. It is like there used to be a worry free brain, let’s call it the high way; and now, instead of taking the highway or the strait shot roads, because you somehow got exited, are taking all these side roads AND getting virtually nowhere! Anxiety can ALSO be very very subtle, you don’t know you are venturing these side roads, you often think you are on the freeway or a main road and your NOT! THIS IS ANOTHER REASON WHY THE BELOW METHOD I’M ABOUT TO SHARE IS VITAL TO YOUR IMPROVED CONDITION. It is because the brain is/has been in an excited state and is learning a new habit of worry- much longer traveling paths and by ways.You see, normally when you go to study something out in your mind and reason the best ways to go in life, you “think” you have it, the best way, the best plan. With anxiety, it develops so subtly that new neural pathways or “side-roads” (but actual brain connections) or habits are being generated [for problem solving]- basically we LEARN how to worry. It is vital to understand that the mind cannot entertain two things at once, so the solution will become as simple as can be and it related directly to this PRINCIPLE. Steven R. Covey once said that you can you can’t break a universal principle, you can only break yourself against them. Miss this principle and you’ll totally minimize what I get to share, this principle by a name. It is called The Linden Method. OK, back to the simple principle then of not being able to think about or entertain two things at the same time- yet it is then a very subtle difference to understand that anxiety comes by way of considering too much the worst case scenarios, pure and simple. THIS is the good news, you know why? BECAUSE what can be learned can often be un-learned OR better put in this instance a NEW way and NEW HIGHWAY can be LAID DOWN… IT IS ACTUAL NEW NEURAL PATHWAYS being generated.(The trick becomes this and this next thing I’ll share is an extension, a setup to understand the extremes you’ll need to go through and to and in order to make this work. It is not my own little corner invention- it is called The Linden Method and 100’s of thousands have been CURED by it from ALL of the various forms of ANXIETY (ptsd, agoraphobia, generalized, ocd, panic attack, phobia… you name it… ALL of them!). It is like I’m not just talking about the new train tracks (highway sections) you’ll be laying down here and now in the short run, but those same tracks, while not any different, need a thorough understanding, nay COMMITMENT, in order to have the determination necessary that part of… beginning with the end in mind here, will consider that some places way off in the future will involve. In other words, that while the same train rails you’ll want to lay down in the here and now gain you instant success, the habit of the brain upon stressors that are hooked normally to the worry will challenge your commitment to the compliance of the program down the road. So, the problem is NOT getting success here and now, but when stressors come up in life, integrating the habits to totally and completely that one will utilize laying railroad tracks and NOT the side roads. Now, later… it will be on this or that steeper slope- do not be deceived by the shorter detours temptations then! If you do not follow the program compliance, to that degree you’ll have been tempted to lay down “your own tracks”- that will become new by ways, not highways associated with mostly or partially recovered vs. ALL THE WAY recovered. Make no bones, TOTAL recovery is our end in mind here with this program!)Now, having said that (above paragraph in parenthesis), BUT the GOOD NEWS IS THIS! IT TAKES OFTEN ONE DAY, TWO DAYS OR PERHAPS ONLY A WEEK TO DISCOVER WHAT I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU IS TRUE. IN OTHER WORDS YOU’LL DISCOVER SOME INSTANT SUCCESS WITH INSTANT RELIEF FROM THE ANXIOUS SENSATIONS. ONCE THIS HAPPENS, YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. It is like high octane fuel jet that will ignite your heart and passion. Your soul will scream and some of not most will cry for the fact of this new found relief and the HOPE that it will then give. I’m not dropping off, the hope will come because… you’ll KNOW you can REPEAT what you just did to get the SAME RESULT. It will make many cry! Only this cry is one of RELIEF and HOPE!OK, then, here is the bomb for total anxiety recovery! The Linden Method. I recommend that you go invest in it. The manual will give things in ways I’ve only encompassed by emphasizing commitment, which feels lame compared to the manual you’ll get, some addressing some, not a lot though, on the specific types and situations. For example, my situation has involved robbing me of morning sleep. In the manual he shares some things I did not get in his Fast Start videos that I was deceived in thinking that was all I needed because of the SIMPLENESS of the program principles, and it is “mainly”, but not all. There might be crucial elements in the manual you’ll need. BUT it comes with the program. Back in the day it was $95. Now, I don’t know, maybe $200. But here is some of it here, the BASIC principles. You ready? Here you go (these were my own notes):The 9 Pillars of the Linden Method- Basic outline and some notes.Stop going to Doctors or Other People (use diversion to move away from it) (Play the part of an actor, the part of the non-anxious you; pretend you are someone else every morning when you wake up)Stop your medications. (Or any other thing that reminds you that you are ill, so need to eliminate all reminders that you are ill or have been etc.)Stop Researching your Condition- just once is once too often. (Adopt the behavior of those that don't have an anxiety disorder; recovered sufferers go out and go on with their lives. It is of a disorder of itself, you are practicing being anxious; internet is the worst for this. Non-anxious people are out there doing the opposite. If you want to learn to be anxious, where do you go. You go to the normal world and can adopt their behaviors.)Only Follow This Method (Don't confuse your brain, can confuse the signals; can't use with other therapies, Linden Method needs absolutely everything you will need to make a full recovery, so don't confuse the signals; if you do it correctly I promise you that you will become completely symptom free)Stop Talking about Your Condition (The cure is done through repetition, and NOT in talking about it. And Your Anxiety or stop reminding others your anxious, bad day or good day, stop any code messages to speak about it to those around you, give the support line a call at Linden method if you need some help. If you talk about how you feel, your symptoms, behaviors etc; you almost program yourself to become anxious. STOP NOW!)Stop Leaning on Other People- You send an unconscious message to your brain that you are weak (WHEN you rely on other people; you may feel week, but you are NOT week, your actually very strong. We often get so used to having other people helping us that we do not recognize that I’m getting other people doing for me things that I’m capable of doing for myself which is giving away “the carrot”, my control and my confidence. Taking responsibility is fast track to be anxiety free.)Don’t hold onto memories of your condition. (Play the part of you as the non-anxious person or way and it will become you. Role playing that your are someone else he mentions again here… and it will become you! Put replacement good memories in areas where you might have not had a good experience before- by avoiding those situations you’re reminding yourself subconsciously that you can’t do those things. Start making new memories and start to create a positive one, that we can almost blank out the negative ones.)Divert your mind. Force your subconscious mind to experience and environment of recovery; an environment where your amygdala says oh, wait a minute I'm not anxious anymore because there is nothing in my environment to be anxious of! Make it your new habit. A very healthy habit. Diversion, distraction. Because it is a human preset to get on with your life. The things you do as a default, you have to get back to, like eating, drinking, sleeping, etc. Create a structure in every day to drive the anxiety out. It means you can drive out the anxious behaviors every day. REPLACING with non-anxious habits. When we put only a little bit of effort into it anything in life success won’t occur. Put the energy into it that you’re going to expect it to occur. You’re not going to create one big diversion that is going to blow your anxiety out of the water, this is not going to occur. You have to use a collection of diversions that will allow you to become effective. Don’t choose things you think will work instead of doing what you enjoy. Needs to be personal to you, what you enjoy. Not asking you to be diverted every minute of every day. TV, only as your interested in what you’re viewing, so keep if focused and balanced.Stop accommodating Your Anxiety Every second that you give in to your anxiety, the symptoms, sensations and thoughts, your empowering it. Every time you give in you send a very very strong message to your subconscious mind, saying actually ya anxiety has got the power to change my life. It can dictate to me. And as soon as you reach that conclusion, you give it all the power it needs to completely envelop your life, to dominate you, in every way. Agrophobia is a perfect example of this, you limit your geographic location and movements because of your anxiety and your world becomes smaller and smaller until eventually you don't go anywhere at all. So, stop accommodating the anxiety because it is completely powerless. Yes it produces some symptoms and thoughts and sensations that are unpleasant and sometimes quite severe, but ultimately there there to protect you, not to harm you in any way. Conclusion, breath, realization- SO STOP ACCOMMODATING THEM, stop accommodating those fears. And I promise you, if you do so, if you stop fearing it and start enjoying your life and getting out in the world, instead of allowing it to dominate where you go and what you do, you will overcome it all the quicker, and permanently. That is an absolute definite.OK, back to the simple principle then of not being able to think about or entertain two things at the same time- yet it is then a very subtle difference to understand that anxiety comes by way of considering too much the worst case scenarios, pure and simple. Anything that can stop that from happening will be efficacious and my only basis for why I have one exception I’ve made for breaking rule number 4 of the Linden Method, to be explained at this website for breaking the habit of false beliefs involving others, other worst case scenarios- thework.com/en .The other alternative: The other method that has merit in the mainstream world of steeped schooling theory [what counselors are mainly taught] to treat anxiety is by way of Exposure Therapy, often in the form of Systematic Desensitization. There has been some success with this. A percentage I think I heard somewhere was it can be 60% effective; where as The Linden team advocate a 100% success with their system I’ve heard some who have tried it and given up… such that I’d put it at a 80% success rate as my guess. But the principle is 100% for The Linden Method and some of this will become more apparent as we contrast it to and explain the one other prevailing theory I know about as mainstream. So, back to Systematic Desensitization.A quick example is when somebody has phobias of snakes, they first create a safe feeling with somebody, that then first shows them for very brief exposure a picture of a snake in a safe environment. The helper then GRADUALLY exposes them to more and more occasions of snakes to where they become GRADUALLY comfortable first with pictures, then greater time duration of those things, all the way up to eventual full blow exposure of handling a live snake and not having any problems with it. While this can work with many phobias, the large category of anxiety disorders has a mixed success ratio, some will say of 50-60% success.The problem with this method is this, that when anxiety has come to dominate a persons life, addressing it directly can be more like just stirs the poo and things do NOT get better, they can often get worse actually. Perhaps what decides if it can get better worse is IF the source of the anxiety, when it started, was it triggered by soemthing, that by unearthing it, and resolving it, things can now heal and mend and exposure might therefor be necessary. I admit this has some appeal. After all, we only need to have had a sliver in our precious skin to understand how, it is only when you ‘get it out’ or resolve the source of the pain, that you can even now expect things to get better. Even “flooding” as another concept of “exposure” seems relevant in that it might take “more pain” up front, on order to have less pain later on. Whether it is settling in our mind that we must be exposed to the very thing we are afraid of, in order to overcome that fear is used, one cannot deny that often the only way to beat fear in life, anxiety plagued or not, for that instant, is to confront it, after which much of the pain associated with it, can subside after swallowing the bitter pill to begin with.The whole problem becomes with this and anxiety is this: More often than not, the source of anxiety cannot be tracked to its origin, thereby negating the “Initial Pain” exposure hypothesis of “Exposure Therapy” thereby even being efficacious. Indeed, inside the Linden manual it is this overarching and plaguing and vexing obsession for the anxiety victim to RESOLVE it, whether it be to return to what caused it or not… that forms the whole basis of needing to give up on that already, AS THE PROBLEM keeping it fueled! There is one overlapping caveat to all of this “excess avoidance” then of the problem inside the Linden Method that even it would concede is VERY HEALTHY to consider. And that is this… and Charles Linden addresses it time and time again… but let US couch this inside a distinction, Charles addresses the pain inside anxiety with the word “sensations”. He addresses the pain through a process not called “exposure” but WOULD HAVE anxiety victims address the pain or sensation, not through examining the source, but in “allowing” the sensations, NOT “avoiding” them, but “allowing” them… stating that they never did any harm to anyone. This is an exposure method to some extent… but let’s get clear, it is not exposure therapy, but reality based acknowledgement that when you do have them, to not assert the need or rather “one does not need to address them, but let them be, as in who cares, they can’t hurt you and have never hurt anyone”. However, he would have us employ diversion and distraction to “get away” from making them our friend as is customary to down play and crowd them out of our lives, thereby rewiring new hardware into our brain capable of feeling less and less and less of them until we have them no more.So, as to “exposure therapy”, for those and it involves most all anxiety victims, as Charles asserts none will ever find the source of where and what caused the anxiety. It is like a behavioral science researcher said as he resigned from being a researcher... that the things for which the research applied for usefulness, involved such a small scope of things relating to real life, having to control for so many variables, applied to a narrow scope of life, so as to render as inapplicable to most of the experience we manage in life. It can be the same with anxiety, there are too many variables to control for in making sure the habit to help resolve the habit, that it just persists; as NOT all the variables can be accounted for to "make one feel safe” while being exposed in a gradual process to those worst case scenarios, when some of them, albeit too small a percentage in their life, actually eventuate.Now an interesting twist here in perception: To emphasize how a small percentage of happening does apply to anxiety, the reverse can be taught. For example, one tactic that is quite effective is to ask in certain situations that cause stress what is the ACTUAL percentage of likelihood, that that particular worst case scenario would ever actually happen. Once it is quantified... the feared item loses its power... THEN to bring the person BACK to reality. So, minimizing and ‘getting away’ from the feared item is not altogether unrealistic, even as the odds tally things to be in reality. Make it your primary focus however, and you’ve done the opposite, given it “more power” than it had to begin with in actual reality.To explore several helpful twists of perception in how this problem can be approached, I do advocate that the Bible for handling stress in the more generalized fashion or anxiety applying to the masses the problem of WORRY… to tackle and overcome, then I give unto you the Bible on how to overcome STRESS/WORRY: “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie.So to me, exposure therapy, whether through flooding or systematic desensitization, it is like the fisherman in the rocking boat trying to get bate onto the hook. Until he could get the boat steadied, he would only continue to be frustrated and getting nowhere, and in many cases... worse off. Pursuing Systematic Desensitization for many people is like the rocking boat and IS that rocking boat. Until the NEW method is applied, talking about it just serves to make matters WORSE!One is better off if needing to ascertain several dynamics in life that cause worry- to go to the bible mentioned above: “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie.To Summarize:Often in life, it is the small calculations that matter the most. Making the decision to ‘get on with your life’ -as in The Linden Method’ just could prove your difference. As for me, it took all I had and then some! I end where I started, do it totally and completely in the beginning, ignore your sensations, they will not kill you. The presence of them does not spell doom, it just means you have more to do, so don’t stand their or sit there or lay their thinking about it, it will only get worse if you do. Do something, anything and everything that you can deem as worthy activities. A small add on for me is this. You can’t get happiness by doing things that violate your conscience, so keep it clean, but do all the those things that are pleasurable and right and good and wholesome and entertaining and the most important… interesting. Do this 24/7 and you will THRIVE!!! Try it and see! I have had success with somebody who had experienced anxiety for years and in a matter of two days he was stating he’s NEVER had the anxiety leave him like this before. It is VERY often INSTANT relief. This IS only part of it. (So, this is not an neat idea ‘you will also find’. Nothing gets this many raves unless something happened. Try it!!! You will then need to make new anxious/interests habits to keep yourself busy and away from all the old worry patterns AND habits. Think of social anxiety as a bad habit Linden says too in his book… get it and thrive… then you can put in all these new things in the place of it. You can’t think of two things at the same time idea. Go for it!!! For me it has made “the” difference!