You do your rounds (a lot of walking), pull out dead animals and carry them with you, re-bait your traps, repair traps as required, dump the dead animals, and repeat over and over again.
I guess there are other forms of trapping - more like hunting, a one off exercise to get that <whatever> - but I would hazard most professional trappers would see it as very much like work.
My gist was more that in both investing and trapping there is a point where the positions are set up and there just isn't anything that you can do to make the process go faster. Not being able to make it go faster by putting in additional work seems to be psychologically difficult to cope with for many people.
I feel this is slightly wrong. I’ve observed the kinds of people most likely to lose their money in this way don’t want to put in additional “work”. They want (hope for) additional “woo”.
The premise of the article was that investing is more like trapping than like farming. Since most of us come from societies with a long history of farming and the resulting cultural norms have permeated through said societies, many people feel like they "must do something" to tend to their investment crops properly.
I'll add my own speculation that in many western societies the industrialization and class warfare rhetoric has created a meme that "only work deserves compensation", implying that supplying capital is an unworthy state of existence. (See for example the many posts on HN decrying every single landlord as a parasite on society) If you want to invest but also want to hold on to your identity as a wholesome "middle class" American (definitely not one of those nefarious "elites" you keep reading about in the news!), just sticking your money in an index fund and doing nothing else may feel dangerously capitalist. Fiddling with it gives you some emotional satisfaction back by "working" on the investments.