The golden rule is for you, not for them

Treat people the way you want to be treated.

Everybody has heard it. Most people got it on a laminated poster in a fourth grade classroom, filed it under Things Adults Say, and moved on.

But we think almost everybody has the reason backwards.

It is not a transaction

The way it usually gets taught, it sounds like a deal. Be nice to people, and people will be nice to you. Put good out, get good back.

Which is lovely, and also not true?? Plenty of people you are kind to will never return it. Some of them will take the kindness and use it as a handle to pick you up by. That is genuinely how it goes sometimes.

If you are being decent as an investment strategy, you are going to feel robbed constantly. And then one day you will decide people are not worth it, and you will stop, and you will tell yourself you learned something.

Here is the actual reason

You do it because of who you are when you do it.

That is the whole return. It is not a delayed payout from somebody else. It arrives immediately, in you, in the version of yourself you get to be for the rest of that day.

Snap at the person on the phone who did not build the policy you are angry about, and you carry that around. Not forever. But for an hour, and it makes you slightly worse at the next four things you do.

Be decent to them instead, and you are just… fine. You go make dinner. Nothing is sitting in your chest.

Which is why it still works on people who do not deserve it

This is the part that took us the longest.

You do not need the other person to be worthy of it. You are not scoring them. You are deciding, over and over, in small unglamorous moments, what kind of person is walking around inside your body.

Rude driver. Check.
Cashier having the worst shift of her life. Check.
Family member who has said the same wrong thing at every holiday since 2011. Check.

None of them earned it. Do it anyway, because you have to live in there with yourself afterward and they do not.

The honest limit

This is not a licence to let people run you over.

Treating somebody how you would want to be treated does not mean tolerating whatever they do. You would not want somebody to keep letting you be cruel to them without consequence. Being kind and having a boundary are the same skill, not opposite ones.

Be decent. Be clear. Walk away when you need to.

Still counts. 🖤