The Moth on Monday Night Raw
Last Monday evening I was half-watching WWE Raw, my attention divided between theatrical combat and a persistent moth circling my living room lamp. The moth kept banging against the lampshade, over and over, its tiny body bouncing off in what seemed futile repetition.1 Something about its determination transfixed me. What keeps a creature hammering against an obstacle with such persistence? What inner programming drives it to continue when success appears impossible?
Its erratic flight reminded me of a parable I once read: A man found an emperor moth cocoon and took it home to watch it hatch. When a small opening appeared, he observed the moth struggling for hours to force its body through a tiny hole. When the moth seemed stuck, the man—intending kindness—snipped away the remaining cocoon with scissors.2 The moth emerged easily but with a swollen body and shriveled wings. The anticipated unfurling of wings never happened. It spent its short life crawling around, never able to fly.
What the well-meaning man didn't understand was how the struggle to exit the cocoon served a purpose. Pushing through forces fluid from the moth's body into its wings. Freedom and flight require struggle. By eliminating resistance, he inadvertently prevented development. His scissors weren't kindness but unconscious sabotage.
I thought about this as the moth in my living room continued its seemingly pointless campaign against my lampshade. Maybe its struggle meant something I couldn't comprehend.3
The Interference Paradox
Consider what happens when we short-circuit necessary struggles. A weightlifter whose spotter grabs too much bar never builds muscle. A student whose parent completes homework never masters mathematics.4 A colleague whose mistakes get quietly fixed by a supervisor never develops competence.
The interference paradox works like this: actions taken from genuine care can stunt growth rather than nurture it. Our urge to eliminate discomfort for others often comes from good intentions—but intention and impact occupy different universes.
I think about when my boss assigned me a presentation for major clients with ridiculous deadline constraints.5 My initial reaction cycled through anger, anxiety, and near-resignation. Sleep vanished. Coffee consumption doubled. But pushing through forced me to distill ideas more efficiently. It compressed months of skill development into weeks. When finished, I realized I now operated at a higher level permanently.
Would I have grown if someone had rescued me? If my boss had seen my midnight emails and said, "Never mind, I'll handle it myself"?
Beyond Comfort
Many psychological frameworks emphasize how growth occurs at edges where comfort dissolves and challenge begins. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow research shows optimal experience exists where difficulty matches capability—but crucially, difficulty must stretch capability, not confirm it.6
Our biology understands challenges. Muscles need microtears to strengthen. Immune systems need exposure to build resistance. Vaccines work precisely because they introduce manageable struggle.
Our emotional resilience develops similarly—not through avoidance of stress but through successful navigation of appropriate difficulties.7
So why do we persistently intervene in others' developmental struggles?
Witnessing Discomfort
Consider your reactions when watching someone struggle. Observe sensations arising—maybe tightness in your chest, an acceleration of breath, a compulsive urge to intervene.8 Ask yourself:
Who benefits from my intervention—truly?
Often our help serves primarily to alleviate our own discomfort. We cannot bear witness to struggle, so we extinguish it. We interfere not because others need saving but because we need relief from watching.
Imagine a world where everyone received exactly enough help—never too much, never too little. Assistance calibrated perfectly to enable growth rather than prevent necessary challenges.9 Could we become sophisticated enough to discern when to intervene versus when to witness with supportive restraint?
The Gifts of Resistance
What capabilities develop specifically through encountering resistance?
Problem-solving capacity expands when faced with genuine obstacles. Confidence emerges from overcoming genuine challenges. Self-knowledge crystallizes during confrontation with limitations.10 Resilience grows through recovery from setbacks. Creativity flourishes under constraints.
Observe children playing with blocks. Give them perfect pre-constructed castles, and play ends quickly.11 Give them blocks alone, watch engagement persist for hours. Humans derive satisfaction from overcoming meaningful obstacles. We need challenges proportionate to our capabilities.
When have you found yourself reaching for scissors while watching someone struggle with a metaphorical cocoon? When has someone snipped yours? How might recognizing these moments change your perception of struggle itself?
A Different Kind of Support
Perhaps true support looks different from what we imagine. Maybe it manifests as standing witness rather than intervening.12 Asking questions rather than providing answers. Offering encouragement rather than solutions. Creating safe environments for failure rather than preventing failure entirely. Validating struggle without eliminating it.
I think about managers who succeeded with me. They never solved problems I could solve myself. Instead, they asked provocative questions. They respected my intelligence enough to let me struggle.13 They created space for imperfection while maintaining high standards.
What if our greatest contribution to others' development involves knowing when to step back? What if real compassion sometimes means allowing temporary discomfort for long-term growth?
The Courage to Struggle
Consider again our emperor moth. Its emergence depends entirely on forcing fluid into wings through resistance. Without resistance—no flight.
For humans, similar principles apply across domains.14 Writing improves through revision resistance. Relationships deepen through conflict resolution. Careers advance through challenge navigation. Perhaps even our consciousness expands through confrontation with limitations.
How might you reframe your perception of struggles—seeing them as generative rather than merely uncomfortable?
When you next encounter resistance, pause. Wonder what capabilities might develop specifically through this challenge. Ask what future capacities might emerge if you engage fully rather than seek shortcuts.15
When you next witness someone struggling, practice restraint. Support without solving. Encourage without intervening. Trust their capacity to overcome meaningful obstacles.16
The Great Terrible Magnificent Truth
Here we arrive at a sort of paradox—a truth simultaneously terrible and magnificent: No one can give us our wings. No one can push fluid into our undeveloped capacities for us. The very mechanism of growth requires personal engagement with resistance.17
And yet.
Even knowing this, we continue reaching for scissors. We continue trying to spare others what we ourselves needed to experience. We conflate ease with kindness, forgetting how our own capabilities emerged precisely through engagement with difficulty.
The moth in its cocoon makes no distinction between struggle and existence. For it, struggle simply is existence—not some unfortunate phase to be minimized. What if we viewed our own struggles with such integration? Not as aberrations from normal life, but as the actual material from which our capacities form?18
Perhaps true freedom doesn't come from absence of struggle, but from recognizing struggle as the very choreography through which we become ourselves. Maybe flight—real flight—consists not in avoiding resistance but in pushing against it with full presence, allowing it to transform us from creatures who simply exist into beings who soar.
And sometimes, when I'm just trying to watch wrestling in peace, a moth circling my lampshade might be the wisest teacher in the room.
1. I keep thinking about psychological momentum in sports—how athletes talk about "finding a rhythm." You can't develop rhythm if coaches stop play every fifteen seconds to correct technique. Somewhere in continuous engagement with difficulty, mechanics internalize and flow emerges. But God, our instinct screams to interrupt—to save, to fix—a neurological override we must consciously resist.↩
2. My cousin once asked if I remembered teaching her to ride a bike. I didn't. She claimed I held the seat for exactly three pushes before letting go without warning, causing her inevitable crash into bushes. When she emerged scraped but furious, apparently I just said, "Now you know what falling feels like. Not so bad, right?" She retrospectively appreciates my borderline-sociopathic approach. Modern parenting literature would crucify me.↩
3. The moth's persistence struck me as both admirable and tragic—this tiny creature repeatedly slamming itself against an obstacle it couldn't comprehend. I wondered if my own stubbornness looks similar from some higher perspective, my repetitive collisions with life's impediments appearing equally futile to hypothetical observers.↩
4. There's a fascinating neurological component here—our brains literally form new neural pathways through resistance. Each struggle creates microscopic failures our systems learn from, developing workarounds and efficiencies impossible through observation alone. You cannot download muscle memory or mental models. You can only build them through engagement with actual difficulty.↩
5. We operate within such twisted systems of reward. Managers receive accolades for "solving problems quickly" rather than developing team capacity to solve problems independently. Teachers get praised for providing answers rather than cultivating environments where students discover solutions. We incentivize intervention over development across institutional structures.↩
6. During graduate school, my advisor never told me what books to read or theories to explore. This drove me absolutely mad. I'd present half-formed ideas expecting guidance, and he'd respond with questions rather than corrections. Only years later did I understand his restraint as profound respect, not abandonment. His refusal to do my intellectual heavy lifting forced me to develop critical faculties I would have otherwise outsourced.↩
7. The universal applicability of this principle astounds me. Consider computer programming. Code exercises with solutions immediately available teach syntax but develop zero debugging skills. Contrast with coding problems where you must find errors through systematic investigation. The knowledge acquired differs qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Some understandings emerge only through engagement with genuine obstacles.↩
8. Consider also what happens to communities sheltered from appropriate stressors. Biodomes designed with perfect conditions often fail because organisms need environmental resistance to develop properly. Trees grown without wind develop weak trunks and collapse. Systems—both biological and social—require stress to develop robust architecture.↩
9. I wonder how much modern anxiety stems from conflating discomfort with harm. We've pathologized normal developmental friction to such extent we view all psychological discomfort as something requiring immediate intervention. What capacities remain undeveloped as result? What muscles atrophy when we eliminate all resistance?↩
10. The difference between enabling and empowering remains among most difficult discernments in human relationships. Sometimes what looks brutal becomes kindness retrospectively; sometimes apparent kindness reveals itself as unconscious sabotage. Maybe true sophistication means developing finer instruments to distinguish when struggle serves development versus when it merely crushes spirits.↩
11. Japanese pottery traditions include Kintsugi—repairing broken vessels with gold-infused lacquer, highlighting rather than hiding damage. The philosophy suggests objects become more beautiful through breaking and repair. What if human development follows similar principles? What if our fracture points, properly integrated, become our most distinctive strengths?↩
12. I think about video games and how developers spend millions perfecting "difficulty curves." Too easy? Players abandon from boredom. Too hard? Players quit from frustration. Just challenging enough? Players enter flow states and play for hours. The right level of difficulty creates engagement. Remove challenge entirely and you destroy enjoyment itself.↩
13. Witnessing without fixing may represent among hardest human skills. Parents struggle with this especially—standing by while children experience natural consequences feels almost physically painful. Yet children with parents who fix everything develop learned helplessness, outsourcing their problem-solving to external agents rather than developing internal capacities.↩
14. The paradox of excellent teaching: the best teachers simultaneously believe you capable of more than you believe yourself capable of, while refusing to do work you can do yourself. Teaching becomes not simplifying material but creating conditions where students discover complexity themselves.↩
15. The cocoon metaphor extends further—the moth requires not just struggle but appropriate struggle against appropriate resistance. Cut open a cocoon early and you disable development. But place too thick a cocoon around a developing moth and you trap it forever. The resistance must match developmental capacity.↩
16. Therapeutic contexts reveal how reconceptualizing difficulty transforms experience. Reframing "stress" as "challenge" changes physiological responses. What if struggle doesn't necessarily cause suffering; perhaps suffering emerges from how we conceptualize struggle. What might change if we viewed all resistance as developmental rather than obstructive?↩
17. My friend's daughter struggled with mathematics until he stopped checking homework entirely. Instead, he asked what specific concepts confused her, encouraging her to formulate precise questions. Her grade initially dropped further—then dramatically improved as she developed autonomy. His restraint, though initially appearing negligent, facilitated growth impossible through continued intervention.↩
18. This gets cosmic quickly. If growth requires personal engagement with resistance, then any attempt to eliminate necessary struggle from someone's path becomes a form of developmental sabotage. When overprotective managers shield employees from challenges, when helicopter parents solve children's problems, when friends rescue each other from natural consequences—all well-intentioned interventions—they may perpetuate dependency rather than foster autonomy. What we call "developing character" isn't adding something external but rather allowing inherent capacities to emerge through engagement with resistance. The moth already contains wings—the struggle merely enables their proper formation. The capacity for flight exists from beginning, not as something acquired but as something revealed through necessary struggle.↩