[watwut]

When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.

What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".

[hgoel]

This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.

We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.

[ambicapter]

Everything is easy when you've done a lot of it, that's how the brain works.

[andrew_lettuce]

That's coasting though, or at best flow. Neither state makes you better. The entire point of making something easy is to be able to build on it.