I managed to finally find the hummingbird moth in proper context and for long enough to take pictures:

I usually just find them dead after they got stuck in the staircase, so this is an improvement. 🙂

What’s the reason why I finally managed to get it? Nothing, really. I just kept doing the same thing that failed before. I went to a blossoming tree with a camera in hope the bugs show up. The lesson, I guess, is that failure isn’t necessarily a sign you are doing something wrong, and reading too much into either failure or success isn’t beneficial. It can be merely a matter of time, or statistics, or factors completely out of your control, such as bugs really liking that tree you chose.

What am I actually suggesting here? There was lots of quasi-spiritual nonsense floating around in the 1990s and I guess most of it kind of stuck with people, and they just assume it implicitly. The problem is, that stuff all mostly contradicts itself:

• if you keep failing, maybe the Universe is trying to tell you something
• follow your bliss
• you need to persist if things are hard, because that treasure chest might be just one inch below the point you stopped digging
• if you stop struggling and let go, you might find out that the outcome you feared might be nothing at all

You see what I’m getting at? It’s all nice sounding motivational bullshit. Maybe the Universe is telling you something, or maybe the bugs just aren’t there that day and you’re doing everything right. If you persist, you might waste your life doing the wrong things, or you might eventually succeed, because it’s merely a matter of statistics, and the thing that led to success isn’t any different than the thing that produced failure before. If you give up, you might regret it, or you might find out that what you feared isn’t really a big deal. It’s basically all some kind of copium people like smoking because it feels nice and comforting. The problem is, in the 1990s when this nonsense was trending, everybody believed it, because they were all reading from the same script and copying each other’s homework. This is also the reason why all those supposedly enlightened people sound so similar. No, it’s not because “The Truth is One”, it’s because they are copying each other’s homework.

Also, if you keep succeeding at things, maybe you should try doing something hard for a change. Basically, if all you’re doing is adding single digit numbers and you keep succeeding, you may think you’re a genius, but there’s another word for an adult stuck in first grade.