There are different hards. I've worked construction: you come home at night tired, but your brain is awake and ready to think (which is why so many veg on the couch - it keeps the brain busy and body resting). In software the hard jobs leave your brain tired, but your body is ready to go - this is a hard place to be in as your brain can't figure out how to get the needed exercise your body wants.

Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.