Thinking About Thinking

I've been thinking off and on about about how hard it is for me to think through difficult concepts, or even to come to a point where I feel that I'm making progress in understanding difficult concepts.  For the longest time, I think I subconsciously believed the Heinleinist view that any problem could be solved with enough attention.   Perhaps thats the case, but if so, then the candlepower necessary to burn through the muck and get to a point of clarity is now frequently beyond me.  Maybe it always was beyond me, perhaps I used to think I had arrived at the POC when in fact I had not, perhaps I've just gotten dumber or more easily distracted,  or maybe the problems have just gotten tougher, but now it seems that I have to accept that there are things that I Just Won't Get.   I cannot easily say how inadequate this makes me feel, but it seems that, inadequate or not, I have no choice.  The only question is whether I'm going to give up entirely on understanding these difficult things, and accept Fox News and the like as my source of information and viewpoints, or generate my own, knowing that it will be full of contradictions and lacunae.