is chess hard

is chess hard or is my brain not functioning

Chess is hard.

I barely use my brain at chess so I can't say definitely

It's like anything else: playing basketball is something you can learn in an hour. But beating other people who've put in thousands of hours of practice and have natural aptitude at the game -- that's hard. Likewise with chess; you can play and enjoy from day 1, but as soon as you have a goal of beating people it's anything from needing to play the occasional practice puzzle to basically being a full time job for a decade or more.

It's true you can but you probably won't be very good

Chess is easy to learn and gets harder the better you get.

Yep, you'd certainly have to be, to not understand the very simple point I made.

Likely both