Plenty of worthwhile things feel neutral-to-hard while you’re doing them. If you only continue what feels good immediately, you end up optimizing for comfort, not craft.
There’s a fairy-tale version of this life.
A producer on a plane with a carry-on studio.
A DJ in another city every weekend.
A sunrise, a crowd, a caption that reads like a contract with the universe:
I followed my passion. It worked out.
And sometimes it does.
But there’s another story – less cinematic, more common, rarely posted – because it doesn’t look like anything from the outside:
You sit in front of your DAW and get haunted by other people’s finished tracks.
Not in the jealous way, necessarily.
More in the clinical way.
Like:
Someone already accomplished the sound you’re aiming at.
Not “better than you.” Just… done. Released. Alive in the world. Attracting listeners. Creating gravity.
And you’re still trying to get your version of it to click.
The brain’s favorite trick: sabotage by ignorance, sabotage by awareness
At first, ignorance is a kind of mercy.
You don’t know the standards yet, so you move.
You finish things.
You export with hope.
You post because the option of “waiting until it’s ready” hasn’t infected your nervous system.
Ignorance gives you momentum.
Then awareness arrives.
You learn what a record actually sounds like.
You start referencing.
You hear the mix problems you couldn’t hear before.
You notice the difference between “cool idea” and “coherent record.”
And awareness is supposed to be progress.
But awareness has a dark talent: it turns your studio into a courtroom.
Every chord becomes evidence.
Every snare becomes a confession.
Every idea is cross-examined by the same invisible prosecutor:
Is this good enough to exist?
Ignorance can keep you bad.
Awareness can keep you stuck.
Different sabotage, same outcome.
“It’s not magic.” (And that’s why it hurts.)
The Instagram story implies there’s a secret ingredient.
Talent. Destiny. The right city. The right friends. The right plugin chain.
Some invisible blessing you either got or didn’t.
But you’ve looked closely enough to know the uncomfortable truth:
It’s not magic.
It’s a song where the elements click.
A kick and bass that cooperate.
An arrangement that knows when to reveal and when to mute.
A mix that doesn’t fight itself.
A master that feels inevitable.
Which means the question isn’t mystical.
The question is personal:
Why can they put their creative ideas into the world… and I can’t?
The part people don’t say out loud: time is a producer too
You can put in “tons of hours” and still feel behind.
You can start at 16, grind, learn, care – truly care – and still not arrive at “mediocre” in a way you trust.
You can even do the responsible thing: professional coaching from someone who has done it.
And it helps. Tremendously.
And still, the needle doesn’t move the way it “should.”
And then a thought appears that feels like realism, but might be grief wearing a lab coat:
Maybe it worked for them because they had their twenties for it.
Maybe the window is smaller now.
Maybe I’ll never be the Martin Garrix.
Maybe I won’t even be remotely close.
Here’s the twist: none of those thoughts are entirely irrational.
They’re also not the whole story.
Because life isn’t a clean meritocracy of effort. It’s cards. Timing. Energy. Space. Psychology. Responsibilities that don’t care about your drop.
You maybe bought a house. Houses are time-consuming in a way that doesn’t feel dramatic until you realize it has quietly eaten your margin for obsession.
You built a career you actually love. Great pay. Stability. Maybe even Freedom.
From the outside: advantage.
From the inside: a strange trade.
Because stability can make your creative longing sharper, not softer.
Not because stability is bad – because it removes excuses. It makes the gap feel more like you.
Comparison isn’t the poison. Meaning is.
There’s a misconception that the problem is comparison.
But comparison is just the mirror.
The real acid is what the mirror means.
When a track doesn’t work, it’s rarely experienced as:
“This track doesn’t work.”
It becomes:
“Maybe I don’t have it.”
“Maybe I wasted years.”
“Maybe I chose wrong.”
“Maybe it’s too late.”
“Maybe music isn’t for me.”
That’s not a creative session. That’s an identity trial.
And then therapy enters the chat – not as a vibe, but as necessity – because chronic self-doubt doesn’t stay politely inside the studio. It leaks into everything until you start living like your own critic is your landlord.
The honest desire: not recognition. The taste of it.
Here’s a detail worth naming because it changes everything:
Sometimes you don’t want success.
You want the sound.
You want that private, sacred moment where your track feels like a record to you.
Not for likes. Not for status. Not to “make it.”
Just because your taste is real, and it wants to be fed.
That’s not shallow. That’s craft calling.
It’s also why this is so brutal: your enjoyment becomes conditional.
You’ll keep going, yes –
but only if it can reach that level.
So the process stops being a place you go.
It becomes an exam you take.
And exams are not fun. Exams are tense.
Even when you love the subject.
“Accept it as it is” (and why that can feel like a curse)
Acceptance is complicated here.
There’s an acceptance that’s basically surrender in disguise:
“I accept it won’t happen, so I’ll stop wanting it.”
That can feel like relief. It can also leave a quiet grief running in the background, because the desire didn’t disappear – it just got locked in the basement.
Then there’s acceptance that’s more adult and less dramatic:
“I accept the constraints and tradeoffs, so I can choose what I’m actually doing this for.”
Not lowering the standard.
Changing the contract.
Because when you’re honest, “making music full-time” has drawbacks too:
pressure to release
pressure to stay relevant
pressure to be interesting on command
pressure to become your own content stream
The fairy-tale version is freedom.
The lived version can be a treadmill with better lighting.
So acceptance isn’t “giving up.”
It’s refusing to let one outcome become the judge of your entire life.
The unpopular pivot: craft doesn’t always feel good in the moment
Here’s the sentence nobody wants on a motivation poster, but it’s the one that survives contact with reality:
Plenty of worthwhile things feel neutral-to-hard while you’re doing them.
A lot of creative sessions are not blissful.
They’re irritating. Confusing. Half-finished.
They’re you deleting a sound you loved yesterday.
They’re you listening to a loop until it loses all meaning.
They’re you realizing you don’t yet know what you’re doing – again.
And if you only continue what feels good immediately, you end up optimizing for comfort, not craft.
That doesn’t mean “suffer more.”
It means you might be using “fun” as your permission slip.
But craft doesn’t offer permission slips. It offers reps.
Reversal
What if the thing you’ve been calling the problem is the only reason you’re still in the room?
The stable job.
The house.
The “late” start.
The awareness.
The therapy.
The taste that keeps hurting you.
What if those aren’t just obstacles to the fairy-tale version.
What if they’re the scaffolding that makes the unpopular version possible: a life where music doesn’t have to save you to be real.
Because the fairy tale has a hidden cost too: your passion becomes your rent.
Your creativity becomes your content schedule.
Your identity becomes your product line.
And the same hunger that drives you becomes the thing that owns you.
So the reversal is this:
You didn’t fail into stability.
You might have accidentally bought yourself freedom from needing music to pay you back.
Which changes the entire contract.
Not: Can this become my life?
But: Can this become my craft?
And craft has a different mood.
Craft is not always joyful.
Craft is often neutral-to-hard.
Craft is you making decisions when the dopamine doesn’t show up.
Craft is repeating boring moves until they stop being boring because they start working.
That’s not romantic.
It’s also not tragic.
It’s just… adult.
And then the awareness – your so-called curse – gets its own reversal.
Awareness is only poison when it’s a prosecutor.
When it’s a compass, it’s precision.
Which brings us to acceptance.
I stop arguing with my age.
I stop trying to redo my twenties through a drop.
I stop making my mortgage a moral failing.
I stop using one outcome as the judge of the whole life.
And the moment you stop negotiating, you get something back:
energy.
attention.
time you were spending on the trial.
So maybe the closing question isn’t “can I enjoy the process?”
Maybe it’s the more honest one:
Can I respect the process enough to keep showing up even when it feels neutral-to-hard – without calling that feeling a sign I should quit?
And the unpopular ending is this:
You might never become the traveling, always-winning, perfectly-lit version of the producer story.
But you can become something that reverses the whole premise:
A person who makes music without needing music to rescue them.
Not fireworks.
Not a revelation.
Just a quieter kind of power:
Staying in the room –
until your craft catches up to your taste.