If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.
If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
I think that in the past it was just a lot more difficult to *not* be heard or appreciated at all
The OP never said this. You and a few other commenters seem to think being heard == being an influencer that’s in it for the money.
> and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
That’s what being heard and appreciated is.
Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing.
By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way.
I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depression exactly because of the mismatch between expectations and our current reality.
Because I've been there.
In my early (1999-2001) music "career", so to say, my music somewhat blew the local scene, it was big in clubs, it played on the local radio, people would repeat catchphrases from my tracks when greeting me, I watched them dance to it. I made so many friends around it.
There was an immense motivation to write a track in the morning and listen to it in the evening on a 10 kW sound system among dancing people, under stroboscopes, black light and lasers cutting through fog.
Then our local club movement died out and its remnants were squeezed into small disco-bars with shitty sound, where people came to booze some and pick up dates, not for music.
And the music itself moved to the Internet. I tried to adapt. But oh boy was that a stark contrast!
I played a live gig in a disco-bar and some drunk morons came and asked me to play "something happier".
I watched my tracks never reach more than a hundred listens on the Internet (with a single random exception).
Ok, you might say it's just my music that is not of due quality or novelty, and you might be right. But I saw so many brilliant artists' profiles with such pitiful numbers of listens over such long periods of time that it totally shatters all illusions of getting heard on the Internet.
You either drown in the ocean of low to zero effort content, or you have to market yourself and again drown in the choir of yelling voices trying to shout everyone over, or you bombard labels with your demos to never get any answer, or an answer you get, but it basically states that you're someone's business asset from now on.
Sure, you can still expect your family or friends to listen and appreciate, but you know what? They don't care either, or care in underwhelming ways. And this alone can break your heart beyond all repair.
Still, I was able to glue mine back and go on with my music. And musically and sound engineering-wise, it's now a cut better than my "popular" and "appreciated" music from my club era. But only me and literally 3 friends of mine know that.
That's what made me a zen(ish) creature and write my original comment above.
I've received a lot of thoughtful responses and am a little embarrassed because I'm probably looking in all the wrong places in my search for identity or joy or meaning. My life kind of fell apart in the last few years, first the career, then the relationship, then my sense of self as I realized all I've ever done were coping mechanisms. At this point, I'm essentially looking for a reason to live, and that places a heavier burden on anything I try than is reasonable.
Sometimes one needs to let go (sounds beaten and banal, I know). In my case, I had to let go of my image as a musician. I didn't touch music at all for a few years. Then I started writing it again, as I please, without following any dogmas, never aiming to release it. And I grew fond of it, while before I mostly cared for how others would estimate it.
Just live aimlessly for some time. Find solace in nature, biking, hiking, watching the clouds, whatever keeps you afloat! The purpose will find you.
P.S. And by all means learn a DAW or a physical instrument!
However, I guess my life is strange enough so that people made assumptions around my original statements that don't reflect my meaning.
Quite frankly, I'm friendless and have very low self esteem and have felt "not good enough" for most of my life.
I remember building Lego starships with a friend a long time ago, and I felt that on a fundamental level, nothing I could ever make would match what he could build. It was like a law of nature that I'm flawed in that way.
Any new interest that came into life also came from friends. Nothing ever originated with me, I didn't have the confidence for that. Having others to collaborate with automatically validates what I do, in a way.
It's possible I simply never learned how to self validate activities.
My need for validation is a very childlike one, it's rooted in emotional neglect. I remember my mom praising other people but never finding praise within our family. One of many things that planted seeds of this sense of fundamental inferiority. Then life solidified that in various ways.
You mention the emotional neglect and the connection to childhood, and I get the sense you’re interested in figuring it out. It made me think you might like Joe Hudson’s work on YouTube.
Artists wanted to "be heard and appreciated" since they started banging rocks together for rhythm and painting on cave walls...
It has been a tremendously rewarding journey to create new music and see myself improve. 10/10 would do again.
I bet a lot of accountants in the old days were really good at basic math, and proud of being fast and accurate and now there's calculators and the amount of people that work on mental math just for the love of the game is probably super small in comparison to when it was a core skill of many more people's jobs.
Definitely recommend to OP to explore the modern warrior philosophy drawing from bushido.
For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous, it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
To clarify, when I speak of "approval", I'm not imagining a successful career or financial success. It's much more basic, i.e. having a few people tell me they genuinely like something I created would do that.
> it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
It's unfortunately not simple for me (again, context of long term burnout / depression etc). If I only go by enjoyment, I will watch TV and maybe read and go on bike rides until the end of my days. But that is not fulfilling in the long term. I have a creative drive, but it's rather intermittent and not enough to consistently want to do the work involved. I'm trying to nurture it.
You can scratch the same music-exploration itch with a much lower time commitment and get the same thrill of accomplishment as you improve. There is also a built-in crowd of other players at any skill level that you can share your achievements with.
It's not the same glassy-eyed state as you'd get with normal video games, TV, or doom scrolling at all. You will need to focus and clear the mind.
But actually creating music or playing an instrument is much more rewarding. The time commitment is part of it, the journey is the destination and all that.
I think you will find that creative works are no more fulfilling than bike rides when you actually get into it. There's no separate magic to it, and a good chance you wont remember doing either of them after some time
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!