If you were mining in 2009 and still mining today with the same hashing power the average time to solve a block has increased by a factor of almost one billion. If that isn't "difficult" then I don't know what is.
BTW I perform all my hashes by hand so that is a lot of pencils and paper.
Silly you, I wrote a program on my TI-84 calculator to help me with that. Sure, it takes a few days to make a Merkle tree, but it's better than the old days when we did it by hand.
Mining also has a target, and a probability, if you don't like the word difficulty, as in "the probability that a single block hash meets the current target is 1 in 3901396778050889728".