When is it practice, play, procrastination, performance or productivity?

I've been trying to get more done with my free time this summer before the new semester rolls in. My default is playing bass - a loud as shit treat for my ears and a skin-indenting workout for my fingers. I don't like going in with any set goals, but I always hope to play a bit more competently than the previous time.

For a long time, I've felt bad that on paper, I've been playing for about a decade but still sound like shit compared to the artists I like or those who've achieved greater feats at a younger age. But deep down, is that even really what I wanted or just what I think would be cool to prove to complete strangers? For all the "do it for yourself, who gives a shit what anyone thinks" I've heard in my life, I just get really pissed off - like yeah, of course I shouldn't care, do you think I consciously want to make myself feel bad? Dipshits.

But I promise I didn't go into this post wanting to just wax acidic. I actually wanted to type this up to answer the question in my subject line. I think the same question can be asked of a lot of art, but as music is my specialty, my examples will reflect that.

What I've come to interpret is that consistently engaging in art can very easily occupy more than one of these Ps at once. In my case, I've come to embrace a stream of consciousness approach to playing bass at home; others may thrive in a more structured approach, but it didn't work for me.

Save for learning to improve posture, my play has also served as practice. If I don't like what I hear or I'm not banging out what I was hoping to hear, I try again and again until I can play it whenever I like. Boom, practice.

Procrastination's a little trickier to define, an inherently negative concept. I'm not presently a musician underneath anyone's timed expectations, so the only way it can be procrastination is if I'm putting off recording something so I can finally get used to the process of using my Portastudio. So yes, I've been procrastinating like a motherfucker on that front lmao I don't know what's up with that, especially since I won't live forever and might as well die without having ever released anything

Performance goes hand in hand with play for me every time. I'm performing for myself first and foremost, like some sort of spiritual "self-service" with extra steps. I'd spell it out, but that'd be pretty tasteless on a SFW website. Anyway, I word things horrendously. So, performance! I'm also happy if others can hear the bullshit I'm playing, because then the pressure's on to not sound like a fraud or pest at the music store. It's practice that way, too. Not my usual guitar, not my usual picks, not my usual pedals. It's all down to who I am as a player and what I can or can't do. I love being at the knife's edge of cringe.

And shit, depending on who you ask, all of the above is productivity in some sense. Productivity is ideally releasing material, but the adventure and sidequests on the way there are just as valuable. That's what I've come to learn in roughly a decade of fucking around with what one might call a castrated form of the electric guitar. I could go on about how versatile different approaches to bass can be, but that's beyond what this post is.

This was supposed to be published a week ago, something far larger in scope. But for one, who's gonna read all that shit? Second and I suppose most importantly, I'd be betraying myself by typing something outside of my style or whatever.

All I can do regardless is thank you for reading this far.