This is going to be complicated, so forgive me for the unnecessary journey we're about to take, haha. Autism does not make for short comments. When I was younger, I used to play a tabletop game at a fairly competitive level. Enough that my friends and I regularly traveled around the country playing in events. I did a lot of reading about competitive gaming in a broad sense to try and improve my gameplay, and there's an idea that you can see _everywhere_ that David Sirlin called "scrub logic." The short version is "scrub" players tend to put themselves at a disadvantage by viewing specific characters, strategies, et cetera as unfair. If the game has a character that's clearly broken, they're likely to give anybody who plays it shit, and devalue their wins. If somebody wins by only spamming a single attack, that's "cheap." Sirlin's point was if you're out to win, ignoring tools the game gives you is dumb. There are unwritten social rules when it comes to how you treat your fellow competitors, but when it comes to playing the actual game, whatever wins wins. This concept is really obvious to me now when it comes to gaming. If somebody loses and downplays their loss because of what the other person did, alarm bells go off in my head. But I'm afraid that I actually have a similar behavior to this when it comes to music. I think the equivalent idea in producing would be stuff like... using samples from Splice is cheating, using presets is bad, et cetera. If the song is good, it doesn't matter if you made every sound from carefully sculpted white noise or if you downloaded a single zip of nonsense, tossed it in your DAW and arranged it. The person listening to it isn't even thinking about these things. Anyway, all of that ranting to say, I think I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels for reasons that don't necessarily make sense. For example, I can't really define what makes up an artist's style. Because I don't have a mental model for that, I often treat things as like single use. I made a great bass sound here, and now I can't use that again because that's just repeating things I've done. Which I understand is absurd, but until I can learn to recognize these scrub logic moments in producing, I feel like I'm going to reinvent the wheel every week.