Learning:fun ratio?

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When I was a young teen I seemed to have developed this really pleasant equilibrium, in that I liked learning and some things weren't at all a choir. I mean, I once wondered why a dictionary was under 'work' on an EEE PC... because I honestly never considered reading a dictionary to be anything but fun (not at all what's implied by 'work', at least). I used to go to bed after a night of reading about mythology all so content.

These days... I still read constantly and still like learning... but much of it doesn't seem to be as fun. It begins being fun and stopped somewhere along the way, although I always try to continue learning anyway, since I wouldn't want to just stop in the middle of something... but that's when it sometimes feel like I'm climbing a hill, even though there are droplets of pleasure at random moments.

Well, anyway... what do you think? Is there such a ratio? What would yours be like?

Mine is a total blur. Occasionally my various hacking and coding projects become a grind, while other times they save me thousands and net lots of cool upgrades for my gadget collection. (hacked EEE pad owner) Similarly, I have a blast teaching myself BMX & mountain bike tricks, but it involves a hell of a lot of crashing; I do this all winter skiing as well. All these factors overlap, and next to my net workload my fun/despair ratio depends on how much time I spend outside or somehow managing to relax.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

I think it's always nicer when you're younger. Everything's so new. it's easy to find new interesting things to learn. When you get older, you have to go more in depth to find new material, go into things that aren't written for the general public in mind. Maybe you have to wade through jargon or try to figure out which of many opposing viewpoints is the most likely to be true. Maybe you have to learn something comparatively boring to understand the things that interest you, like having to learn calculus to understand astrophysics.

Maybe it's like--when you're ten, a candy bar is the best thing in the world. When you're thirty, it's an unremarkable snack. You just get a bit jaded. But that doesn't mean the candy bar isn't still tasty, nor that you're any less hungry than you were when you were a kid. You've just gotten used to it.

I love learning about my intense interests, but learning about anything else is a chore.

Callista, yes, but perhaps it isn't set in stone like many people make it seem... perhaps at certain times the mind can still be neuroplastic enough to not find things repetitious... by being high, maybe.

Learning is really fun if it has something to do with my special intrests or sometines a random topic that captures my intrest. In order for it to stay fun I have to be making resonable progress in retaining and understanding the infomation or else its not technically learning and not learning is not fun and not fun usually means boreing and frusterating. make sense? If I don't care about the topic it will always be boring and frusterating.

Yes learning is fun. The brain is an amazing toy because it is so much fun to learn things when you become intensely interested in something. Not just rote learning, but exploring concepts, making connections, expanding ideas, and being creative. I need to have an intense interest to be preoccupied with, my mind just craves the excitement of an intense interest. If I start to lose interest, something else will come along to fill the void.
If you are in a rut it may be from the demands of life and school and being forced to learn things you may not find interesting.