I'd like to clarify my comment 4 levels up.

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.