I try to be a fairly nice person. There’s really nothing fundamentally wrong with wanting to be seen as ‘nice’—some might even consider it a valiant pursuit. Honestly, there isn’t a better compliment one could receive from a brand-new acquaintance who only has your first impression to go off of. Simply put, it shouldn’t make sense to view being nice as a bad thing. Sure, there are a few butthurt individuals who continue to spout derivatives of the phrase “Nice guys finish last,” but for the most part, being considered a ‘nice person’ definitely isn’t an insult.
And now, my dear reader, I must make a confession: I am not particularly fond of overly-nice people.
I’m aware that it’s an absolutely disgraceful thing to admit, and that I should probably cast myself out of polite society for even daring to think it, but it’s still true. People who find themselves on the average side of nice, I have no qualms with. Those people are still able to connect with the majority of the population because their niceness doesn’t completely overshadow their need to be a selfish, rude, or moody every once in a while—otherwise known as a human nature. But those who let niceties govern their thought processes, speech patterns, etc. baffle me on a fundamental level. I cannot for the life of me hold a meaningful conversation with a person who is ‘too nice’ because I don’t know what topics are safe. I don’t trust the spoken opinion of a person who is too nice because they can easily change their opinion based on who they’re speaking to. When I talk to these people, I find myself tiptoeing around anything of substance because substantial topics can cause disagreements, and disagreeing with an overly-nice individual is immensely unsatisfying. And heaven-forbid you slip up and accidentally say exactly what you think, because compared to the words spoken by a severely nice person, anything even remotely snide or sarcastic will make you look despicable in comparison.
If I may put it bluntly, being too nice makes one boring.
Once a person has decided to pursue niceness on its own, that person is allowing their personality to be swapped with ‘nice.’ No sarcasm or wit, no jokes at the expense of others (even those who deserve it), no gossip, no voicing the thoughts in your head that could possibly be taken as insults. And anyone who says that they don’t appreciate all aforementioned things to at least some degree is a dirty liar, and you know it.
Whenever I would find myself stuck in a conversation with one of these people, I couldn’t stop thinking about how stupendously bored I was the entire time. I never found myself waiting excitedly for them to finish a story—or even a sentence, for that matter—because I knew I wouldn’t find anything that interested me in their words. Everything remained surface level, neither party learning enough about the other to form a lasting bond of any kind.
So if you choose to take away anything at all from my musings, remember that even though one does not hate ‘nice,’ one does not become best friends with ‘nice’ or fall in love with ‘nice,’ either.
