This is a spinoff thread to the Honest=Mean thead. But I just want to know why does being nice equate to being fake? I hate when I’m being sincere and kind that people think I’m B.Sing when I’m not. But when I’m blunt and straightfoward the same people will be so quick to call me an inconsiderate beyotch…what’s up what that:confused:?
I wouldn’t say nice equates to being fake. But nice often is fake. So when people think that your “nice” is fake, they are just recalling other instances when “nice” turned out to be fake, and using those to evaluate your “nice”.
It’s because of their own insecurities and the need to justify their own hostile behaviors with the belief that “no one is really nice”. It’s a sad worldview adopted by the fundamentally broken who cannot understand altruism or kindness and thus fear its manifestations.
Some people are just not capable of being nice and meaning it, therefore they cannot accept that other people can.
I grew up in Southern California. Californians are generally rude people. A lot of them have a sense of self-entitlement. Driving the freeways is almost a combat sport.
I married a military man, and we did our share of moving. His last duty station before retiring was Ft Knox, Kentucky.
I had a LOT to learn about people! I found the folks in Kentucky to be genuinely NICE. I was enchanted by the Southern accent, but the BEHAVIOR of everyone was unreal to a California resident. Seriously!
The first thousand or so encounters I had with the people in Kentucky, I had to STOP myself from blurting out, “What do you want?” Because in SCal, people are only nice to you when they WANT something from you.
These people were just NICE to everyone!
I hated the climate in Kentucky. I hated the snow in the winter, the humidity and the bugs in the summer. I liked the blooms everywhere for about fifteen minutes in the spring. In the fall, the leaves turning color captivated me for about twenty minutes or so.
But the PEOPLE! Oh, my, Kentucky, you can be proud of your residents!
~VOW
You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. 
Why not just be “sincere, kind and straightforward”? That way, what can they say? 
Because usually that’s exactly what it is; pretending that you like someone or something, laughing at jokes that aren’t funny, ignoring the way someone is mistreating or exploiting you or someone else. Bringing up uncomfortable facts or complaining about something isn’t nice.
That would only be true if you thought everyone sucked all the time. Being nice is merely pointing out the good things rather than the bad. It’s no more honest or dishonest than always criticizing someone.
But doing that pretty much ensures that people do suck all the time, since they’ll get no negative feedback; they won’t learn from their mistakes, won’t mend their behavior. Something that happens with people in positions of authority all the time; since people beneath them don’t dare criticism them, they keep making the same mistakes, don’t realize they aren’t as charming as they think they are, don’t notice when they’ve screwed up.
There was a thread a few weeks ago that touched upon this. One of the ideas there was to the effect: If you’re hurting in some way, then some people will tell you all kinds of nice and uber-hopeful and phony-optimistic, etc., things, just because they think it will make you feel better – BUT – what they’re REALLY doing is just trying to make themselves feel better (for making you feel better, of course). That’s where the concept of shallow comes in.
I’ve heard plenty of bogus feel-good BS over the years, some of which I even felt were outright lies. I have an Internet-style abbreviation for it: BSDL : Bull Shit, Doubletalk, and Lies. There’s plenty of it out there where I come from. (Well, okay, that’s California, but I’m not sure that’s totally relevant.)
I have to disagree with this. If someone is hurting, I want them to feel better; that’s just the way I am. If I can help them feel better it makes the world a little better place. I don’t get any kind of "make me feel better’ out of it, unless you count knowing I did a good thing to try to help.
I try to be nice whenever I can - even to people I really don’t care for - but I don’t consider it to be “fake”. I just see no point in not being nice under most circumstances. If being hateful is not going to do anything other than make someone feel bad, what’s the point? Even if I don’t like someone I don’t get off on ruining their day.
Don’t get me wrong, I can be a cast-iron bitch when the situation calls for it.
Let me give you an example. I have a friend with very, very low self-esteem. She’s really bad about beating herself up again and again for her mistakes and going on and on and on about it. A week or so ago, she was all over Facebook about an incident having a full time pity party. Both on FB and in person I gently tried several times to get her to let it go. When she kept it up, I just flat out told her, as nicely as possible, that she was driving her friends away with her behavior. When it finally sunk in she stopped moaning about it - at least in public - and let it go.
There is a difference between trying to change someone’s behavior by showing them the negative consequences of that behavior and beating them over the head with it.
I’m not sure that you and I have a dispute here. I’m pretty sure I described something different that what you are describing. If it really makes you feel better about yourself to say things to other people that is really helpful to them, no problem with that.
I was talking about the people who make vacuous and shallow “feel-good” remarks to other people that aren’t helpful. I don’t want to list the compendium of BSDL that I’ve heard over the years because I don’t want to hijack this thread that way. Let’s just make a semi-hypothetical example: You have a friend (but not a particularly close friend) whose husband just had a stroke and is now a near-zombie with little hope of making any substantial recovery. You tell your friend, repeatedly, that you just know her husband will recover and be as good as new before a year passes. And you tell her about every on-line story you read about how well it went for someone else (whose cases weren’t really the same, and besides, you don’t have personal knowledge of them), so it will go well for your friend’s husband too. That kind of thing.
That kind of thing maybe works well the first time. But if you persist with that kind of false encouragement, it just gets cruel. That’s the kind of BSDL I’m talking about. That’s the kind of BSDL that I think the OP is talking about. SnakesCatLady, that might or might not be the kind of helpful things you say to people. But I’m a little bothered by your remark “… that’s just the way I am” because I see a hint there that you might not be able to tell what’s really helpful versus what’s just shallow.
Oh, I see what you guys are saying…
I wouldn’t say that this is true in every situation, but it’s often the case. It reminds me of a friend of mine who, maybe ten years ago, did not believe me when I called my baby sister was my favorite human being, because she didn’t think that brothers and sisters could ever be genuine friends. This opinion was informed by my friend’s experience with her own older brother, who evidently had spent his childhood being a perfect shit to her.
That doesn’t mean it’s always or even usually the case. I like being nice to people, even strangers. It makes me happy. And my official position in life is to assume that persons around me are good and likeable until they demonstrate otherwise.
That’s not very nice.
I’m not all sunshine and flowers and fulffy bunnies. In the situation you described above, I’m more likely to say “you’ll deal with it and you have friends and family to help” than “he’ll be good as new”. Lying to someone in a misguided attempt to make them feel better is bullshit, as you noted.
I don’t think I’m a shallow person, although I guess it can be hard to tell from the inside. I’m not going to blow smoke up someone’s ass, but I’m not going to walk away from someone who needs a kind word, either.
Another issue is how people are instructed to be “nice.” Usually being “nice” is not defined as something affirmative such as being helpful, or being kind, or being considerate. We have words for those things and they are helpful, kind, and considerate. It is usually defined as something NOT to do, such as not making waves, not making trouble, avoiding confrontations, and saying the polite thing. To some degree, being nice is the same as having social skills. BUT nice can be confusing because it places ideas like cohesiveness and harmony over individual integrity, which in American culture is generally regarded as fake and a negative.
Let’s say for example, at a family gathering, if some drunk family member insults you, you are not supposed to say anything about it, as it “isn’t nice” to stand up for yourself at a family holiday, it “isn’t nice” to confront someone at holiday time. So, you laugh it off … “nice” but inside you’re furious … “fake.” There is a strong association between the word “nice” and following a socially-acceptable script regardless of your feelings. Another word for that is “fake.”
Now personally, and unlike Holden Caulfied, I think fakeness makes the world go 'round and for the most part there’s nothing wrong with it. Like when you say your friend’s baby is “so cute” but actually it looks like a squashed up chimp. I think everyone would agree that “being a friend” and “following the script” are the same thing in this situation. There’s no value in the truth, and it doesn’t matter anyway what your opinion of the baby’s cuteness is. But there are other situations in which the push towards niceness/socially acceptable script is not nearly so innocuous. For example, in families with abuse, very often the one who tells the truth is usually branded the “troublemaker” and the “not nice” one.
Hopefull this isn’t too disjointed to follow. Apologies for any typos.
Sometimes it’s a function of the person in question judging others by their own instincts, but sometimes it’s a matter of judging others by those people’s past behavior. I can think of about a half dozen folks who if they’re saying something pleasant to you, that means it’s time to start figuring out what they want…or else feeling around your back for the knife. The trick is to not extrapolate those people’s bad behavior to everyone else.