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It takes away from my sleeping hours since I usually compose at one go and start late at night and finish in the early hours of the morning. Also, if you compose non-professionally, as I do, it takes a lot of time and effort with little tangible material reward. In return, I get the satisfaction of having created something valuable, of having put my inner experience, individuality, and attitude into tangible external musical form. And the greater reward comes when the piece I have composed gets performed. That is the time for recognition of one's talent, of one's efforts in having put in the time to compose - i.e. put one's inner experience, individuality, and attitude into tangible external musical form. The performance of a composer's piece, especially during a concert, is tangible proof to the composer of the value of their composition. As such, it is very rewarding. It also creates a link between the composer and the performer, the performer realizing the "composition as a mental/subjective concept" into an actual, living, organic, independent entity, an objective event, standing on its own independent of one's mind. The role of the performer is central to the creation of this objective event, to the realization of one's composition independent of one's mind and as an objective reality. Moreover, the performer integrates their own subjectivity, and their own understanding and philosophy of the piece (i.e. the expression of the composer's subjective truth) into the realization of the composer's subjective truth as expressed in the piece as an objective event. I suspect also that there is an inherent satisfaction to composing in the sense of creating a narrative, a psychic coherence in one's life, or an organizing of one's experience and expression of one's essence and inner attitude, in short the synthesis of experience and being. I think that is the essence of composition itself: a synthesis of experience and being. And that is bound to be inherently satisfying, since otherwise experience and being would be in disaccord, or ill-fit. Composition makes them fit, rounds the rough edges, fuses their otherwise juxtapositional coexistence; makes experience palatable to one's being on the one hand, and one's being adapt to and integrate experience on the other hand. Let me here also add about the special reward when composers' subjectivities interact as is the case in one composer composing a piece on another's theme. Recently I had that reward when one of my themes was used by YC composers to compose 4 (till now) special pieces, each in their own particular style and making sense of the theme relative to their own subjectivity and musical logic. Then I had, in a separate challenge, the opportunity to experience it at the other end, when I composed a piece of my own on a theme by a YC composer. Both of these experiences were rather illuminating. I think in them composers' subjectivities interact with one another to give each other insight of another kind to that of performances. I think this kind of interaction and the (mostly compositional) insights it provides might be even more useful and rewarding (in another way) to composers than that provided by performances of one's pieces. It remains for us YC composers to fully exploit the possibilities of such composer-composer purely-compositional interaction. I think these challenges should be a mainstay of YC. We have yet to reap their full benefit. It is something still being discovered, and the future of YC and its composer-members can only be enriched by it.