For years and years, I could not play single player games. They held very little for me to want to do. I remember a key moment where I was playing assassin's creed origins, and it felt like a journey I tagging along on. Despite it being an open-world game, the game felt like a taxi ride with a good view. I was comfortable and I could just hang out. I didn't need to change anything about the way I think, and after a day of playing the game, I left it the same as I entered. If I got nothing from the game, I couldn't get myself to play.
In Elden Ring, progress comes not only in the form of statistics, but also in the form of skill. This skill is required to progress the game. The items and xp make you want to get better, and getting better makes you want to use the items.
Despite this skill progression, Elden ring is still just a game. Games are easy. Games are more or less designed to be fair. The rewards are higher than life, and the risks minimal. Losing in elden ring is just lost time, while losing in life may mean days or weeks of stress.
Things in life are hard in a way even hard video games are not. Elden Ring is hard but there is a strong reward associated with overcoming that challenge. Hard things in real life aren't always that clearly rewarding because they weren't designed to be game. Video games even difficult ones and even ones that require patience allow you to progress and learn and grow within the confines of the game, because the game presents you with a friendly universe where actions lead to rewards and there is a wiki of objective truth about the game. But if I try to think in the same way about playing the guitar or studying maths, this friendliness is lost, because now instead of playing within a friendly universe, we are trying to progress and learn and grow within the often unfriendly universe of our own lives.
In real life, there is no guarantees that the levels were made to be achievable, and they harder just because of this lack on intention behind their design. When you try to prove a theorem in mathematics, there is often no friend out there who designed the problem to be approachable for you. Often this is the case in school, because teachers set problems that can be solved, but in research the intractability of a problem often seems like staring into the intentionless void at the foundation of out universe. It's often times very scary, and that fear carries with you to every unsolved problem. Once you feel the unfriendliness of the universe, even tractable problems that appear to be intractable begin to look scary.
But it's important to remember that everything is unfriendly if you aren't looking for a friend. We must work with the unfeeling universe to start to guess its secrets.