Being nice vs being good
It’s nice to be nice, but it’s even better to be good.
The nice mindset and the good mindset may seem like the same thing on the surface, but underneath that soft-fluffy exterior are two completely different animals.
When we’re nice without proper intent, we’re looking to make an investment from which we can immediately gain. Even if that gain is self-satisfaction of successfully making someone happy. “I did that”, “I did a good deed today”. I’m not trying to say not to be nice, but sometimes we’re doing it as a means to a not necessarily righteous end. In my opinion, a nice person is just doing nice things for one of three reasons:
To make themselves feel like a better person
To be liked by others (I can be guilty of this if I’m totally honest)
To use as a future emotional bargaining chip (knowingly or unknowingly)
If you find yourself being nice for the above reasons, then you may be a “nice” person. Again, the point I’m trying to make here is that being nice, is nice, but the nice action taken is not necessarily the right thing to do. For example, it’d be nice to let your friend cheat off your test, but not exactly the right thing to do.
Being good is a practice of determining the most just and righteous course of action, whether it makes you feel amazing or terrible. The action you commit to is done because you feel it is genuinely the right thing to do. The intent of the action is key here. It’s not an either/or scenario. You can be doing something good and nice simultaneously if you feel it was the right thing to do. For example, if you give up your seat for an elderly because you felt that they needed it more than you did, then you did a nice thing for the right reason. If you forcefully wrestle your friends keys away from them after you notice they are clearly wasted, then you did a not so nice thing (in their mind at least), but you did it for the right reasons.
As a result, people who fall into the “nice guy” (or “nice person”) category are usually stuck in the following tropes:
I can get away with doing this one wrong thing because I’ve done all these other nice things already
Why don’t they like me when I’ve done ALL these things for them?
I did something nice for you, so you owe me this favor
Being nice just to please the other party or for your own gain is eventually going to lead to a stressful situation, because a nice person’s expectations for their actions are way off course. A good person won’t fall into the above mentioned tropes because they wouldn’t justify bad behavior; they just own up to it, they don’t care if someone doesn’t like them because they never do an action to be liked by others, and they don’t do deeds with an expectation of any return.
All this matters because I think the number one thing “nice people” are oblivious to is that others know that you’re being nice just to be nice. If you’re breaking rules just to make someone else happy or keep asking for return favors then they don’t see you as a good or nice person, they see you as a push-over. You do not want to be in that position, a bad person will take advantage of said nice person, and decent folk will try to avoid scenarios where you do favors for them because they don’t want to unwillingly be stuck in a social obligation. So you’re either being used for your “niceness” or other people see through what’s going on and avoid you like the plague.
On the flip side, a “good person” doesn’t necessarily attract anyone and everyone, but it does garner respect from others since a good person follows certain principles regardless of the detriment to themselves. For an example, I did really well in my computer science classes early on in college. Some of my classmates would ask me to sit next to them so that they could cheat off of me. I flat out denied, and my classmates got the hint pretty quickly. I wasn’t liked by them, but I didn’t really care. Another group of students asked to help them study, and I was more than happy to help. In later classes the classmates that I helped previously offered to help me in the classes I was weaker in. I wasn’t helping them initial for help in the future, but it’s just how it all worked out. As you can see, people are also more receptive of help and advice from the good person, as they know they won’t be burdened by a social obligation moving forward. Even better though, good people tend to attract people with similar ideals and principles.
So throw away the social debt balance you carry, give little regard to how well liked you are and just do things because it’s genuinely the right thing to do. People will definitely pick up on your good nature and this in itself will pay out dividends (which isn’t what you were aiming for anyways…right?).
