Good introspection makes you look at other people's blind spots and flaws, and makes you realize that there is no fundamental reason why you couldn't have the same in your own life.
Here are some examples:
§1. Religious people are clearly dogmatic. Even scientific people are dogmatic when it comes to metaphysical stuff. Spiritual people also are, in the vast majority of cases, dogmatic. It's unlikely that you aren't dogmatic about some thing, in one way or another. Accepting that allows you to spell out your dogmas more clearly, instead of pretending that you are above it all.
I personally don't trust people who put themselves as 'open-minded' and 'non-dogmatic'. Chances are that there is a set of things that they are very dogmatic about (such as the meta-belief that every idea is valuable, that every culture is equal, or default assumptions of our times such as the myth of progress) but which they can't see because of the personality they build and broadcast about being so 'open-minded'.
My personal dogma revolves around the Reality 'beyond' the self. I have read Darren Allen for several years now, and I find his writing fascinating, but I can't say I have pierced through the veil of the self in my own experience. I know enough about the self to see its recurring patterns, and its fundamental limits, but I do not know what exactly is 'beyond' that.
Accepting something about yourself doesn't mean that you have to change immediately. People often refrain from looking at something in themselves because they feel that they will have to change their entire life around it, because they won't be able to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing something clearly about themselves. I disagree with this implicit black-and-white frame. Being honest with yourself, even if it doesn't lead to change, is better than dishonesty.
It is of course suspicious if someone pretends to be 'honest' but never acts on what they say, especially about their own life, but one virtue is better than none, so I think that being honest but not being willing to change at this instant in time, for one reason or another, is better than remaining in denial.
§2. It is very, very difficult to never get triggered by people or circumstances. As the famous saying by Ram Dass goes: "if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family." It's easy to see when other people are reacting from old emotional wounds, but not so easy to see it in ourselves, precisely because the wounds have often led to subconscious strategies that make us not look at them for what they are. Thus, instead of feeling the grief of not being loved by our parents, we lash out at them in anger, because anger makes us feel empowered, in control, in a way that grief doesn't.
§3. I have addictions, most notably, porn and mindlessly scrolling through things. Chances are that you have some too. Addictions are very common in our world, firstly because they have never been as easy to get into: porn, gambling, booze, weed, social media, video games, all of those are so much more widely distributed, and even accepted, than they were in the past. Furthermore, the decline of repressive authorities and overbearing families have created a vacuum that addictions usually feel, by giving false promises of 'freedom'. Addiction feels like freedom to the addict, until they try to stop.
§4. I often have days where I do not want to do much of anything. I am tempted to call this 'laziness', but again, this doesn't really clarify what is going on does it? I have a bunch of excuses to myself about how I simply need to recharge my batteries from time to time, but I think there's a bunch of things I am avoiding with regards to my creative work (particularly drawing which feels upsetting, discouraging), and that I am not very good at managing my time, which leads to long periods of limbo where I am neither resting nor being focused (though it's worth wondering why that's happening in the first place?). The fact that I feel resentful of people for being 'lazy' is a pretty big tell that I have a shadow regarding that.
§5. Thinking that we are good people no matter what we do, and that others are bad based on the worst behavior we have seen of them is a surprisingly common habit of mind. A way we can describe it is simply pride, the belief that we are above certain things and that our standards for how we judge things are flawless. I think that accepting our evil side is a very important part of being mature, because again, it helps us see ourselves clearly. Instead of "I am never the one at fault, which means that I need to come up with obtuse justifications about how it's other people's fault", the mind instead goes in the direction of "it is entirely possible that I didn't act right in this instance, how can I take responsibility?"
One thing I have noticed about myself is that I don't seem to care about many people besides myself, including my parents. The immediate justification that comes to me is that I have closed my heart, out of a defense mechanism for not being seen or heard in the environments I grew up in, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to take responsibility for the pattern.
§6. It's easy to demonize people who engage in a habit of excess, when we ourselves do not have access to that in the first place. The main one that I see are those people in social media calling out powerful people for abusing their power. Fair enough, we should not blindly allow abuses to continue, but then again, most people have never abused their power because they've never had any to begin with. They haven't shown that they can be trusted with power, and frankly, I don't think the average leftist would be much better in a position of power, I think they are just as prone to self-deception (if not more, because of the aspect of pride I mentioned above) and being self-interested.
§6b. Likewise it's easy to call out people who act from a place of scarcity when we ourselves have access to abundance. This is true for money, but especially with regards to feeling safe, the two things being very much related with one another. Leftists call out right-wing people for being racist, because of their stances against mass-migration, but by and large, migration disproportionately affects lower class areas. The migrants who find themselves in middle-class areas, and middle-class jobs, have gone through a filter that ensures that they are amicable and prone to obeying rules, but what about the lower class ones who turn to crime because they have no real other opportunity? The cure to demonizing an entire group based on a small sample size is not to pretend that they're all angels, but instead to be grounded in Reality and see the granularity of human beings.
§7. It's tempting to call people out for repeating the same patterns in their life, such as that girl who keeps getting herself in the same type of awful relationships, or that guy who keeps talking about reaching financial independence but never does anything about it, or that coworker who keeps talking about losing weight but drops his habits shortly after the new year, etc. But we are far more prone to patterns than we would like to think.
I have felt sort of stuck for the past years, not in the sense that nothing in my life has changed, but in the sense that I haven't grown anywhere near as much as I would have liked to. What I've come to understand is that the reinforcing nature of a network of problems is difficult to evaluate without going through it, because it leads to a series of non-linear effects and feedback loops, both of which are difficult to evaluate through our mind. But from the inside, as in while it's happening, it's even more difficult to see, because the tiredness and lack of time might be part of the problem.
Here is a personal example: if you don't like your job, you will feel drained by it, making it difficult to do things you enjoy in your free time. This compounds over time to make you more tired, feel like you have little time for yourself, and maybe when you do engage in the things you enjoy, you find that they are no longer enjoyable because they feel frustrating and stressful, because they are relegated to the periods of your week where you are more tired and less motivated.
Every time I would try to make a change about this, it wouldn't stick for very long, and I would feel even more demotivated because I feel like I have become worse at changing myself. The downwards spiral of tiredness and loss of embodied joy is invisible on the inside, because it happens so slowly that it doesn't really jump at you, but it leads to real effects, such as the inability to make big changes to your life. This is why I felt the need to leave my job, it wasn't just a small obstacle, it felt like a central problem that accentuated everything else.
§8. Similarly, it's tempting to be angry at, or even make fun of, people who make the same mistakes as the ones we used to make in the past, but obviously this is a symptom of not understanding that we all go through life in different ways. Some people intuitively know things that took us decades to learn, while it can be the other way around for the things we have never struggled with.
I have learned more quickly the importance of establishing boundaries than a lot of women do, but the average woman lives a life completely different from my own, and they experienced very different things when they were young, particularly from their parents. Meanwhile, there are people who have never felt particularly anxious about being around people, meanwhile my default experience is that I feel like I am in enemy territory when I am in any social environment.
A good heuristic to see how well you are living is to think how much of your life you would change if you were constantly being observed, including your internal world (because it is easy to pretend to be good on the outside, but being genuinely good from the bottom of your heart is something else entirely). Of course, I am not suggesting that it would be a good thing to be constantly observed, it's incredibly creepy to feel like you are being constantly watched, whether by a human being or by some metaphysical entity. But it does highlight how many things about us are kept out of sight because we know deep down that they are ugly patterns.
The point is not to judge yourself about how much of a sinner you are, but about making honest observations instead of judging yourself. Judgement is an attack which causes up defenses to be erected. Observations simply note how things are, as a foundation for real, lasting change. If you judge yourself for being addicted, you add shame onto the addictive loop. If you observe the circumstances that lead you to reach out for your addiction, you have the opportunity for real change.
The main reason to prefer observation over judgement is that the latter basically never work. I have never seen someone become a better person by judging themselves for being bad. This is the trap that society falls into: shame as a social mechanism to punish people from being deviants, but it doesn't lead to joyful, truthful and wise people, it leads to people who are afraid of stepping out of line, like a dog with a shock collar around its neck, which sends an electric current whenever the dog gets too far from its home.
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Introspection Honesty Selfdeception Personal
2026-06-29