Haikus, composing music and rewards

A couple years ago, Shyrwyn decided to write haikus. She would write and publish one haiku a day.

Then I had the idea to convert her haikus into videos, with original background music what I would write myself.

And so I would create at least one song every day.

All the haikus that were converted into videos were posted on YouTube in cronological order. If you watch the playlist you will notice that the music improved over time (without ever becoming actually good, let’s be clear).

Only makes sense. The more I wrote music, the better I became at doing it.

It didn’t last long though. At some point I stopped writing music and later Shyrwyn stopped writing haikus as well.

Many times I have watched those haiku videos and thought to myself how far I could have gone if I hadn’t stopped composing one song a day. How skilled could I have become? What kind of music would I be composing today?

These thoughts, of course, are nonsense. It’s like asking myself: “What if I had wings?” I don’t have wings, and I haven’t continued to compose.

The thing is that composing music is not all fun and games. It required doing repetitive, boring tasks like finding the best sound, fine tuning them, searching for filters, etc. You could spend over an hour listening to ever kick drum sound you have without being able to pick one that fits. It could be very tiring.

In the end, I stopped composing because it was not rewarding enough to justify the pain of doing it.

On February 15, 2023 I’ll have completed 2 years working as a General Manager for my father’s business. During this time, I have been performing all kinds of tasks. The vast majority of them are soul sucking, annoying, boring, exhaustive tasks that made me question my choices more times than I can remenber.

But I didn’t quit. I persisted. I continued.

This time, the reward is big enough.