Since I'm doing a fresh installation (no, "install" is not a noun) of all of the software that I use, that process will pose an impediment to creating anything with it. Issues of incompatibility and deprecation have already been stalling me out. However, the impediments to creativity that I've been experiencing over the past couple of years run deeper as I consider them. Hardware/software serves as a convenient excuse, if not a metaphor, for matters farther beyond my control.
The most immediate reason** why I've not been as productive, or prolific, in the past two years is that I'd been forced out of the environment in which I'd so freely operated and let my creativity flow. The place where I'd lived for a long time was sold to someone who wouldn't retain the few tenants remaining after most of the apartments in the small complex had been rented-out as AirBnB units for a few years. Although I eventually appreciated being forced out of that neighborhood and the property that I called "Skinwalker Suites" due to its supernatural infestations and inexplicable occurrences, I landed in a domestic situation that just doesn't smell the same; where I feel like an animal wrested from its natural environment and placed in an enclosure. Although I live in a better neighborhood now, I'm lacking the feeling of coming home to the space where I cohabit with my Muse.
Accompanying this change of residence have been changes in my lifestyle: different conditions of employment, novel things that demand my money, and doubts as to how much I really welcome this new lifestyle and how I could transition out of it into more one aligned with my desires (yeah, "Good luck with that," I know). I could consider myself more "settled," but feel myself to be leading a life resultant from a cataclysm, in which I'm still breathing-in dust from the rubble and poking-and-picking for remnants of what I hope to find aren't lost forever. Among those are threads of relevance that contribute to a stream of inspiration.
The sudden shock of such a disruption in my life also formed a sense of "the before-times" in response to it. Something further impeding my creativity is, out of longing to return to a situation out of which I'm ironically relieved to have been extricated, comparing my endeavors since then to my pre-cataclysmic work. Although I'm right, to some degree, to feel that my recent stuff isn't as "good," that assessment is exaggerated by feeling bereft of the liberty by which I'd operated previously. But then, it has always been the case that if I get into listening to my music from a particular prior era, I envy some quality to or aspect of it that I'd cultivated at that time. I have to remind myself that my music by me has always been "about" change and evolution, and that from any given point, I'd moved on to things that I hadn't done previously. The difference between "before" and "after," in this present case, is that I've realized that both the sense and reality of loss have rendered me unsure of the value of whatever I do. Established behaviors in a novel environment feel maladroit, even if they are not. How much is it okay to act in captivity as I had in the wild?
A sub-condition of this is that, in looking back upon the subject-matter of songs I'd done over the years, I find a lot which would not occur to me now to write about, so I start to doubt how valid my present ideas and inspirations are, based on whether they'll become similarly "outdated" or foolishly "right-at-the-time." I also doubt whether the subject-matter and execution, at its best, of new material will endure as points of pride to me. But then, how I'd gotten anywhere with my songs and so-called music was by doing "whatever" and following it up with "whatever else." Freeing myself of my current impediments to creativity might simply be a matter of spreading the scent of my urine around my enclosure, though the Landlord might have something unkind to say about that.
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(*) OS 27 will not support Intel architecture; OS 28 will be the last to support Intel Macs.
(**) Disregarding novel medical realities. Nothing about being young prepares one for getting old.