Working out whether a question is actually worth working on is a lengthy, deliberate, and subjective process. Being aware of the difficulty landscape in a field is crucial in making such determinations. Every new advance in mathematics reduces the difficulty of solving problems, which reduces the difficulty landscape of the field. While there are an infinite number of possible problems to solve in mathematics, the vast majority of these problems are not worth focusing on. The indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools achieves the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained.