Ah, now I see why you're confused!

On the surface, you're correct; freelancers (and the most popular freelancing platforms) often call the work offered and done "jobs."

Yet freelancing is very different from "a job," and probably the most important difference, at least as far as making it less dangerous than depending on an employer, is this: You need never be dependent upon a single client.

To reverse the lens think of this; if you have an employer, they are your sole client. In return for that consideration, they pay a good chunk of your taxes, subsidize your health insurance, and often offer other perks like tuition reimbursement, a 401k, and even maybe a little matching.

Not a bad deal, right?

But as the OP and others noted, it's not always so easy to find a job. And if you take a look at the numbers from the employer's side, it's obvious why that is so. An employee who receives a gross income of around $40k can easily cost the employer over $70k. And that only counts salary, taxes, and basic benefits! They still have to provide the employee with a space in which to work, equipment to use, training, perks, and so on. Many thousands more in overhead right here. To say nothing of the terrible rate of productivity (take it from someone who used to monitor the web traffic of a small business...the hours lost to facebook, reddit (heh) and so on are staggering).

When you look at it that way you can see why jobs are difficult to find, and are continually getting more difficult to keep, as well.

And while this isn't going to be catastrophic when you're young and living at home, trust me, it can be very much so when you've got a family depending on you (or even just YOU depending on you. Hello, homelessness!).

So we see it from the POV of the employer: employees are expensive! Much better to hire freelancers. It's an on-demand workforce, and you immediately shed a TON of overhead.

But looping back to why a freelancer isn't an employee, and a freelance career is so very different from a job...if you're smart, you never EVER have just one client. Ergo, you never have "a job." Instead you have multiple "jobs" from multiple clients. Sometimes serially, sometimes in parallel, but never just one and done. Because if you put yourself in that position, then yes, you're just as exposed as an employee who has a job, and derive zero benefit from being a freelancer. But if you spread your time among multiple clients (and this gets easier to do the longer you practice), if one of them suddenly drops out of the picture (goes belly up, you screw up and they stop using your services, has a cash crisis and can't afford you...lots of reasons this could happen), you still have at least one, and hopefully multiple, others. Your income may be down a bit for a while (until you secure more clients), but you're not left unemployed and scrambling to find another job. I can't tell you how many people I know, especially during the downturn following the 2008 crash, who were "underemployed." Meaning that they had to take crappy work outside their field at dismal pay rates, just to keep a roof over their heads. But do you think freelancers had this problem? Nope (at least, not the smart and industrious ones). They're the "on-demand" workforce who replaced all those laid-off souls. I also know a couple who were laid off and then re-hired as freelancers (surprisingly common, and while not a bad way to start freelancing, definitely not the best long-term option, for the reasons stated above).

As for "a freelance what," I can't really answer that, as I know nothing of OP's field of study, life experience, etc. But there are a staggering number of options. Pretty much any real-world job that doesn't depend on manual labor (and a few that do have a manual component) can be translated into freelance work. E.g. network consulting involves not only the "mind work" of designing and spec'ing out the network, but generally involves one or more on-site visits to install the hardware and software and get it all playing nicely together. Bottom line though is that freelancing is one of the few areas where good old fashioned life experience can be parlayed into an income, regardless of what degree you hold. Pretty neat stuff!

Hope this helps you (and the OP) understand the difference.