What I have to say in this newsletter, and probably in many of the ones that will follow this year, won’t sit comfortably with everyone.
I’m learning how to say what I really think. I’m learning how to trust myself and be seen more fully, without smoothing the edges to make it more palatable for others.
Some of what I have to say here may not land the way people expect. It may not be for you. And that’s okay.
There is a lot going on in the world right now. It is loud. It is in our faces. Here in this country, yes, but not only here. Watching what is unfolding keeps bringing me back to something ancient and deceptively simple.
The Golden Rule: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Wouldn’t it be something to live in a time where this actually came to fruition? Where we didn’t just talk about loving our neighbors, but treated one another with real care, respect, and decency?
How do we get there? How do we actually live in alignment with this age-old edict?
When I slow it down and really look at it, one glaring supposition becomes impossible to ignore.
It assumes that we know ourselves well enough to love ourselves, which feels like quite a reach.
This isn’t a new problem. Humans have been circling this question for as long as we’ve been leaving records of ourselves.
Across cultures and centuries, the same instruction keeps surfacing in different language, aimed at the same place.
Know thyself.
It was carved into stone at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know thyself.”
Socrates echoed the same insistence centuries later when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Lao Tzu put it this way: “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.”
And Augustine urged a turning inward rather than outward when he wrote, “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.”
Different eras. Different languages. Same demand.
Before you try to fix the world, know yourself.
Before you decide who is right and who is wrong, know yourself.
Before you take the moral high ground, know yourself.
And yet, we keep trying to skip this step.
We want to change the world before we understand ourselves. We want to argue our positions before we examine our motivations. We want to be seen as good or morally right before we’ve taken an honest look at what’s actually driving us.
Getting to know yourself is, more often than not, an uncomfortable experience.
If it isn’t uncomfortable, you’re probably skimming the surface. Real self-knowledge asks for a kind of honesty that strips away the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we do what we do. It exposes the places where our values are propped up by fear, identity, or unexamined loyalty. It forces us to confront the parts of ourselves we would much rather project onto someone else.
This is the part most of us avoid. Not because we’re incapable, but because it costs us something. Certainty. Superiority. The relief that comes from believing the problem lives entirely outside of us.
And yet, this is the work.
So I’m going to ask the questions most of us try to outrun.
Not the ones we’d answer out loud. Not the ones we’d offer at a dinner table or post online. I mean the ones that surface when no one is watching, when there’s no audience to impress and no position to defend.
Who am I when I feel threatened?
Who am I when I feel justified?
Who am I when I am convinced I am right?
These are not abstract questions. They show up in how we speak, what we excuse, what we laugh at, what we ignore, and who we quietly decide is beyond our care or concern.
If we’re paying attention, we can see the pattern everywhere.
They show up in the moments we justify our reactions instead of examining them. In the satisfaction we feel when someone we disagree with is humiliated, punished, or harmed. In the way outrage can feel clarifying, even energizing, when it’s aimed at the right target.
They show up when we make allowances for our own behavior while holding others to a standard we would never survive ourselves. When we explain away our sharp edges as truth-telling or conviction, but label the same behavior in someone else as cruelty, ignorance, or danger.
This isn’t about pretending we don’t have reactions. It’s about refusing to lie to ourselves about what they mean. If I’m willing to look closely, I can see how easily judgment slips into dehumanization, how quickly certainty turns into permission. I can see how often my sense of being right is propped up by fear, loyalty, or the need to belong to a side.
And once I see that, I don’t get to unsee it.
That’s the cost of self-knowledge. It removes the comfort of ignorance. It takes away the easy story where I am always justified and the harm always lives somewhere else.
This pattern is old. It didn’t start with us, and it won’t end with us. Humans have always been tempted to outsource their shadow, to project what they don’t want to see in themselves onto someone else. It’s easier to locate evil, ignorance, or danger out there than to confront the ways those same impulses live closer to home.
That doesn’t make us uniquely bad. It makes us human.
But it does make self-knowledge non-negotiable.
This is why so many spiritual and philosophical traditions return to the same warning, again and again. Not because people are uniquely corrupt, but because we are predictably human.
In the Christian tradition, the caution is blunt:“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
In Buddhism, the Dhammapada names the same tendency: “It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own. One shows the faults of others like chaff, but conceals one’s own faults as a crafty gambler conceals a losing throw.”
In the Bhagavad Gita, the emphasis is placed squarely on self-mastery before action: “Let a man lift himself by himself; let him not degrade himself. For the self alone is the friend of the self, and the self alone is the enemy of the self.”
And again: “One who has conquered the mind is a friend to himself, but for one who has failed to do so, the mind will remain the greatest enemy.”
In Confucian teaching, the sequence is unmistakable: “When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.”
And in the Sufi tradition, the teaching is often offered simply: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
Different languages. Different symbols. The same restraint.
Before you judge, look inward. Before you correct, examine yourself. Before you claim authority, do the work.
When we refuse this work, judgment doesn’t stay neutral. It hardens. It turns into permission.
Permission to dismiss. Permission to dehumanize. Permission to explain away harm as necessary, deserved, or inevitable. Once we are convinced we are morally right, it becomes frighteningly easy to justify what we would otherwise never allow ourselves to do or celebrate.
This is how outrage turns intoxicating. How certainty becomes a shortcut. How cruelty starts to feel like conviction.
And it rarely announces itself as cruelty.
It shows up as jokes we wouldn’t tell if the roles were reversed. As silence when harm doesn’t touch our people. As relief when someone we’ve written off finally gets what we think they deserve.
If we’re honest, most of us don’t fall into this all at once. We slide into it gradually, one unexamined reaction at a time.
And that’s exactly why knowing yourself isn’t a safeguard. It’s a requirement.
Because once you see yourself clearly, you lose the luxury of pretending your reactions are harmless. You can’t unknow what’s driving you. You can’t keep blaming circumstances, other people, or the moment without also acknowledging your own participation.
Self-knowledge doesn’t make you gentler by default. It makes you accountable.
It asks you to notice what you excuse in yourself, what you rationalize, what you defend under the banner of being right or being justified. It asks you to pay attention to the split between who you believe yourself to be and how you actually show up when it costs you something.
That’s not abstract work. That’s daily work.
And it’s where integrity either takes root or quietly erodes.
You can see the difference almost immediately when someone is doing this work. There’s less urgency to be right and more willingness to listen. Less appetite for humiliation and more restraint around how power is used. Less certainty that other people are the problem and more curiosity about what’s actually happening in the space between us.
This doesn’t mean agreement. It doesn’t mean passivity. It doesn’t mean abandoning convictions. It means choosing not to weaponize them.
It means recognizing that how you hold your beliefs matters just as much as what those beliefs are.
Two people can believe the same thing and move through the world in completely different ways because of it. One holds their beliefs with humility, aware of their own blind spots and limitations. The other holds them with certainty, superiority, and contempt. The belief itself may be identical. The impact is not.
How you hold your beliefs shows up in tone. In restraint. In curiosity. In whether disagreement becomes a conversation or a battleground. It shows up in how quickly you listen, how easily you dismiss, and how much humanity you allow the person across from you to keep.
When beliefs are held without self-knowledge, they harden. They become tools for justification. When they are held with self-awareness, they come with responsibility.
And that changes the tone of everything that follows.
This is why the work of knowing yourself isn’t private or self-indulgent. It has real effects. It shapes how you speak when you’re angry, how you respond when you’re challenged, how much care you take with people who don’t mirror you back.
When self-knowledge is absent, we default to reflex. We react instead of respond. We confuse intensity with truth and volume with conviction. And without realizing it, we start treating people as problems to be solved rather than human beings to be encountered.
Knowing yourself interrupts that pattern. It slows you down just enough to notice what’s actually happening inside you before you act on it.
That pause is where choice lives.
And this is where knowing yourself begins to change how you see other people.
Not because you become better than them. Not because you transcend your flaws. But because you start to recognize your own humanity, imperfect and unfinished as it is, and you begin to see those same pieces reflected back at you.
When you are willing to face your own fear, your own defensiveness, your own capacity for judgment or cruelty or self-deception, it becomes harder to pretend those qualities belong only to someone else. The gap between “us” and “them” narrows. Not because differences disappear, but because the illusion of moral distance does.
You start to recognize familiar patterns. The same fear wearing a different costume. The same longing for safety, dignity, belonging. The same need to be right, to be seen, to matter.
And that recognition changes things.
It doesn’t eliminate disagreement. It doesn’t require consensus. But it does change how we hold one another while we disagree.
It makes dehumanization harder to sustain. It makes it harder to delight in another person’s suffering or dismiss them as irredeemable. You may still oppose their ideas, their actions, their choices, but you no longer get to pretend they are something other than human.
That’s how the bridge is built. Not through sameness, but through honest recognition.
If knowing yourself is the first step, then loving yourself is the one that follows.
Not the kind of love that excuses everything or avoids responsibility, but the kind that can hold what you see without turning away. The kind that makes room for accountability without collapsing into shame. The kind that allows growth without requiring perfection first.
That’s where this goes next.
Because once you can see yourself clearly, and once you can stay present with what you find, the work of loving your neighbor stops being theoretical. It becomes something you practice from the inside out.
We’ll talk about that next week.
-Sunny
