So helium is a limited resource. Okay gotcha. So why not take two hydrogen atoms. Take their protons and neutrons. And just fucking start squeezing them together until you get helium?
And I don’t mean in the same way you get H2. Those are still separate from each other.
Its just hard for us. Not hard at all for a sun, which makes up a far greater proportion of observable matter than what exists at ‘our’ temperature/ gravity. Even then, gasses make up an even larger proportion of observable matter.
So a counter way of asking the same question might be “Why is it so hard to not undergo nuclear fusion?” or “Why is it so hard to not be gas?”. Even further, the observable stuff is practically nothing compared to the relatively unobservable stuff. So maybe the question could be “Why is it so hard to not be dark matter/ energy?”
Just something to consider in the framing of your question Fat Tony, is that you are asking it from your perspective, and there are assumptions baked into the view you have of the universe because of your position. If you were a neutrino, or a star, or some gas in the milky way, you might consider things very differently