You don’t get dirty when you plant a tree in Animal Crossing and have to do a bunch of extra laundry. No grit under your nails that sticks around for a couple days and sometimes ends up in your food. You don’t pull a muscle and spend a whole week miserable. You don’t get blisters. You don’t want to go plant a tree but then you can’t for real-life days on end because the weather is bad. You don’t get mosquito bites, or worry about ticks maybe giving you a debilitating illness.

You don’t have to go find the shovels, mulch, scrap cardboard, whatever. Maybe craft a shovel, but that may take less time than walking to the garage. It’s a minute or less to reach the spot you want to plant it. You will not dig and hit a big rock and have to relocate, or have to worry about hitting utilities. The tree’s roots will not trash your sidewalk if you plant it in the wrong place. The tree will not fail to grow.

“Work” in video games is rarely anything at all like real life “work”, even before you layer on workplace bureaucracy and regulations and stuff. There’s no mess, no danger, (generally) no actual costs, and usually you can’t really screw it up, and if you do, there are no actual consequences. Stuff like travel times or how long it takes to do boring tasks are usually compressed.