skill is almost frustratingly inevitable. If you do something enough, you will get good at it. This outcome is nearly impossible to avoid.
yet so many things are fun in completely different ways when you're bad at them than when you're good at them. playing slow songs in a rhythm game. mashing buttons senselessly in a group smash bros match. drawing crude art of your favorite characters. writing gratuitous fiction full of every bad trope on the list, failing your first dungeon in an MMO. exploring your first steps into intimacy.
i'm learning guitar right now. i'm not very good at it. i can't play much more than a few arpeggiations, maybe a chord if i'm lucky. often with mistakes and pauses and missteps.
but what i can do is explore all the intricacies of how a guitar can sound. the subtle changes in tone as i strum with my finger pads, or my finger nail, or a pick. how the strumming angle and power changes it, how strumming in just the right spot turns the sound into an almost perfect square wave, how pressing down hard and fast against a fret makes two notes sound out, how different tunings lead into different melodies so naturally. i can make the metal wires rattle in a pleasing way, or keep them mute. i can discover all the percussive potential of the wooden body of an acoustic. i can feel the hints of what a guitar player's callouses feel like. i can experience the first joy of someone i love telling me that my playing sounds beautiful.
i will get good, eventually. and maybe some of these joys will stay; others will be rote. taken for granted. subsumed into the subconscious beneath the layer of awareness. it's strange, isn't it?
