I agree, that's what I told my friends, to just keep learning because if I could why wouldn't you. The point of my post is that I have realized how unhelpful that comment is because if someone told me that about music today... all I see is an insurmountable mountain ahead even though I've read quite a bit about it already

Mind you it's different with for example fluid dynamics or functional programming or even chemistry or biology, I have zero knowledge of it (nor interest) and all I know is that it's hard... but I know that if I spend years learning it I will succeed. I don't know how to explain this feeling I have with music - it's just foreign on another level

It can be very frustrating when someone you are trying to instruct just bails out on something that appears, at least to you, very simple to understand just by following some easy, clearly defined steps, and they exclaim: "No, I can't do this. It's just too complicated!"

In some cases, perhaps even most, this is due to an aggressive indifference to learning something new, but maybe it is not always the case that this is the explanation? It could be that the mechanism for understanding this one particular matter is genuinely missing or undeveloped in that person's brain.

It's because they treat music like a math problem -- something that only necessitates reading and writing. That's how you play math, after all, but that's not how music is played.