Stop Being 'Nice': It's Icky

Nobody likes nice. That is the first thing and it is the thing that nobody says clearly enough so I am going to say it at the top and then spend the rest of this essay explaining why it is true. Nobody likes nice guys. Nobody likes nice people. Nobody likes the particular texture of someone being nice at them. Nice may be tolerable. It may be acceptable. It may get you through a dinner party without incident. But nobody has ever been drawn to it. Nobody has ever been moved by it. Nobody has ever fallen in love with it or trusted it or felt safe in its presence and the reason is that nice gives people the ick. They can feel it before the nice person has finished their first sentence. And what they are feeling is not a response to goodness. What they are feeling is an involuntary recoil from a performance of goodness by someone who is lowering themselves on purpose and hoping to be rewarded for the lowering.

That is what gives the ‘ick’. Not the content. The stance.

What Nice Actually Is

Nice comes from the Latin nescius. Not knowing. The same root that gives us science except nice went the other direction entirely. Science is the thing that insists on knowing. Nice is the thing that insists on not knowing. And for five hundred years the English language watched that insistence and slowly decided it was a compliment. It took the word for ignorance and dressed it up as pleasantness and by the time anyone noticed what had happened the costume had become the thing itself and now we tell our children to be nice as though we are telling them to be good when what we are actually telling them is to be empty in a way that does not bother anyone.

But I am less interested in the etymology than in the mechanism. Here is what nice actually does. Nice is self-averaging. If being mean, as I have written about before, is the act of treating another person as ordinary when they expected to be treated as special, then being nice is the act of treating yourself as ordinary so that nobody has to deal with who you actually are. Mean flattens the other person. Nice flattens you. Mean removes someone else's particularity. Nice removes your own.

And it does this consciously. That is the critical thing. That is what gives the ick. Nice is not the absence of awareness. Nice is awareness pointed in the wrong direction. The nice person is not oblivious to the room. He is hyperaware of the room. He is tracking every reaction and calibrating every response and managing every surface and he is doing all of this not for the other person's benefit but for the management of his own image. Nice is self-conscious. It is the constant monitoring of how you are coming across and the constant adjustment of yourself downward so that you come across as non-threatening and agreeable and good and the monitoring is visible. It is always visible. People can see the machinery. They can see the person editing themselves in real time. They can see the act of suppressing what is obvious and presenting the suppression as virtue.

That is what gives the ick. The visible machinery of self-positioning. The legible act of making yourself smaller than what you know and calling it humility.

The False Humility

Here is my confession and it is not the one you might expect. I was never nice. I have almost never been nice. But for years I thought I was. Or at least I thought I should be. People would talk about other men and say oh he is the nicest guy I know and I would hear that and wonder why nobody ever said it about me. I would watch other husbands and colleagues and friends get the label and I would look at myself and think what am I doing wrong. Why not me. People would tell me I was not nice. Not as an insult exactly but as a fact. A description. And it landed like an accusation because I thought nice was the thing you were supposed to be and I could not figure out why I could not get there. The world kept telling me that the highest aspiration available to a man was to be one of the good ones and the good ones were the nice ones and I kept looking at myself and wondering why the label would not stick. I was not lowering myself. I was not self-averaging. I was not suppressing what I saw or pleading ignorance or building pedestals for other people to stand on while I waited on the middle plateau for someone to notice how humble I was being. I was just standing there. Seeing what I saw. Saying what I thought. Holding positions. Being specific. And for a long time I thought there was something wrong with that. I thought the absence of niceness was a deficiency. I thought I was failing at something I was supposed to be doing. It bothered me. It genuinely bothered me that I could not get people to see me as nice.

I understand now that they were seeing me correctly. And I am glad. I am glad nobody ever called me nice because nice was never the thing I was failing to be. It was the thing I was succeeding at not being. I just did not know that was a success until I understood what nice actually costs.

Pride is sinful. I believe that. But there is a vast distance between being prideful and being not prideful and nice lives in that distance and pretends it is the same as goodness. It is not. The opposite of pride is not self-erasure. The opposite of pride is genuine service which requires you to actually be someone in order to have something to offer. You cannot serve from a position of voluntary emptiness. You can only perform service from there. And performance is what nice is. It is a performance of moral harmlessness by a person who has decided that harmlessness is cheaper than honesty.

Humility has an object. It says I am small before something that is large and it serves the large thing. Nice has no object. Nice just says I am small. Full stop. It prostrates itself but not toward anything. Not for any reason. Not in service of anything greater. Just downward. Just lower. And then it waits. It waits to be noticed for the lowering. It waits to be rewarded. It waits for the other person to reach down and pull it up and say thank you for being so nice and when that reward does not come, because it never comes, because nobody asked for the performance, the nice person gets resentful. That resentment is the ick. It is the thing underneath the smile that everyone can feel. It is the entitlement that lives beneath the self-abasement. The expectation that self-erasure should be repaid with love or admiration or at minimum with being told you are one of the good ones.

Nobody owes you that. Nobody asked you to go down there. And I never went down there. That is the thing I am only now allowing myself to feel something like pride about, and I am aware of the irony of being proud about not being falsely humble but sometimes irony is just the shape the truth makes when it finally arrives.

The Nice Guy

This is what nice guys finish last actually means. It does not mean that good men are punished for their goodness. It means that men who have averaged themselves down to a value that offends no one are not attractive to anyone because there is no one there to be attracted to. The nice guy has become the arithmetic mean of himself. The value you get when you take every opinion he might have had and divide by the number of situations in which he chose not to have one.

And people can feel it. The nice guy thinks the lowering is invisible. He thinks the pedestal he has built for the other person looks like genuine admiration. It does not. It looks like what it is. A person who has made himself small on purpose and is waiting to be rewarded for it. And the waiting is the thing that repels. The particular ickiness of someone being nice at you rather than genuine with you is one of the most repellent things a human being can produce because it asks you to participate in a transaction you never agreed to. It asks you to accept a performance of smallness and return it with a performance of gratitude and the whole thing is false from the foundation up.

The nice guy pleads ignorance. That is the nescius in him. I did not see. I did not notice. I had no idea that was the situation. And everyone around him knows it is a lie because the things he claims not to see are evident to everyone else. He is not ignorant. He is choosing not to know because knowing would obligate him to act and acting would make him not nice and not nice is the one thing he cannot afford to be because not nice is all he has. Take away the niceness and there is nothing left. He made sure of that. He averaged it all away.

What I Watch In My Own House

My daughter Ruby is six. This morning she scratched her sister over a set of stickers and I took the stickers away and she screamed for an hour. And during that hour I watched the difference between nice and something better play out in real time across two parents who love the same child and approach her with completely different machinery.

Nice says I love you it's okay take my strength it's okay I love you while the child screams and the consequence dissolves and nothing sets. Nice makes itself the good parent by making discipline the bad parent. Nice optimises for the short term. It makes the crying stop. And then the next time the child grabs her sister she does it again because the last consequence evaporated before it had time to mean anything.

What I did was hold the line. I took the stickers. I escalated when the tantrum continued because that is how consequences work. And then after the storm had passed I stopped at a shop and got a snack and sat with her and told her that my love is unconditional. That it does not depend on who she is or what she does. That I do not enjoy punishing her. That it is my job as her father and not my preference as a person. That if I did not care I would just give her whatever she wanted and that would not make a good person it would make a nice one.

That distinction is the whole thing. If I did not care I would be nice. Niceness is what not caring looks like when it is wearing a costume.

What My Wife Wished I Was

My wife and I have been together for twelve years. She has never once called me nice. Not once. And for a long time that bothered me. I thought it was an indictment. I thought it meant I was failing at something fundamental. Other men were nice. Other husbands were nice. They lowered. They accommodated. They averaged themselves down and their wives said they were nice and I could not figure out why my wife never said that about me and I could not figure out whether that was her problem or mine.

It was neither. It was a description.

I think my wife wished I were a nice guy. That would have been easy for her. A nice guy is legible. A nice guy is manageable. A nice guy is the kind of man you can dismiss when you need to dismiss him because the dismissal is already built into his posture. He has already put himself below you. He has already agreed to the asymmetry. He has already averaged himself down to the point where loathing him is almost justified because what is there to respect. The nice guy has pre-emptively answered that question by removing everything that would have warranted the respect. She could have loathed a nice guy and felt fine about it. She could have looked at the self-abasement and the false humility and the pedestalling and said this is not a man who sees me this is a man who is managing me and I do not have to take him seriously.

But I was not that. I was not lowering myself. I was not pleading ignorance. I was not suppressing what I saw. I was certain and I was conscious and I was standing right there at full height seeing exactly what was in front of me and saying it. And I think that is what has terrified her for twelve years. Not cruelty. Not indifference. Not the absence of love. The presence of someone who actually sees. Because you cannot dismiss a person who sees you. You cannot manage a person who is not managing themselves. You cannot loathe a person who has not pre-emptively lowered themselves below the threshold of respect. You can only reckon with them. And reckoning is terrifying. Reckoning requires you to stand at full height too and meet them there and deal with what is actually happening and that is not nice. That is the opposite of nice. That is two specific people standing next to each other without costumes and without pedestals and without anyone averaging themselves down and it is uncomfortable and it is real and it is the only version of a relationship that is not built on mutual performance.

Here is the real question. If nice is a detectable distortion then what is the thing that is not a distortion. What is the form of goodness that does not pedestal others, does not average the self downward, and does not lie about what it sees.

The answer is not kindness. Kindness is close but it is still too soft. It is still too much a feeling and not enough an action. Kindness can still be performed. You can be kind at someone in the same way you can be nice at them.

The answer is conscientiousness. And the answer is consideration. And the difference between these and niceness is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of direction.

Nice is self-conscious. Conscientiousness is conscience-conscious. That is the hinge. That is the whole thing.

Nice is preoccupied with how I am coming across. Whether I seem good. Whether I seem non-threatening. Whether the pedestal is stable. Conscientiousness is preoccupied with what is true and what is right and what is owed and what it means to act without falsifying yourself or the person in front of you. It does not require you to lower yourself. It does not require a pedestal. It takes an objective stance. It says something much closer to the golden rule. Treat others the way you would like to be treated. Not from below. Not from a position of self-imposed smallness. From beside. From the place where two people stand next to each other as actual specific people and deal with what is actually happening.

Considerate means you have considered. You have looked at the other person and taken in their position and weighed it and responded to what you actually saw. That is an act of cognition. It requires you to know something. Which is exactly what nice, by its own Latin root, refuses to do. Considerate is the direct negation of nescius.

And you can be caring without being nice. Compassionate without being nice. Empathetic without being nice. All of those things are genuine. All of those things require you to actually see the other person. Nice does not require you to see anyone. Nice only requires you to manage yourself. That is why nice gives the ick. Because everyone can tell the attention is pointed inward. Everyone can tell the consciousness is self-consciousness. And everyone can tell the difference between a person who is acting from what they are and a person who is acting from what they are trying to look like.

The Difference Between Trying and Being

This is the last thing and it is the most important thing.

I was never nice. I am not nice now. On my best days, my most confident days, the days when I am fully showing up as the person I am, I am not nice at all. I am considerate. I am conscientious. I have considered the person in front of me and I am acting with conscience. Not because I am trying to be good. Because I am being good. And the difference between trying and being is the difference between nice and everything that is better than nice.

Trying is a performance. It is conscious of itself. It monitors and adjusts and calibrates and it gives the ick because the machinery is visible and visible machinery always gives the ick. Being is not conscious of itself at all. It is just the thing happening. It does not announce itself. It does not need to be noticed. It does not manage its own perception. It is just a person who has considered another person and is acting with conscience and those two operations do not require any lowering or any pedestal or any of the false humility that makes nice so unbearable to be around.

And here is the proof. On those days nobody feels the ick. Nobody recoils. Nobody squints. Nobody gets that look on their face that says I can tell you are performing something at me. The interaction just works. Because there is no machinery to detect. There is no self-positioning to see through. There is just a person being present and dealing with what is in front of them and that presence is not icky because it is not trying to be anything. It just is.

I spent years thinking I was broken because I could not be nice. I was not broken. I was just not performing. And the people around me could tell the difference even when I could not. My daughter does not need me to be nice. She needs me to have considered her. My wife does not need me to be nice. She never needed that. What she needed, what terrified her, what she is still learning to stand next to, is a man who actually sees her and does not lower himself and does not look away and does not plead ignorance about what is obvious. That is not nice. That is conscientiousness. That is consideration. That is presence. And it does not give the ick because it is not a costume. It is just a person, standing there, being what he is.

Stop being nice. You were not supposed to be nice. Nobody was. Be considerate. Be conscientious. Be caring and compassionate and empathetic and present. Be all of those things because they are real and because they require you to actually know something about the person in front of you and to stand at full height while you do it. Nice requires the opposite. Nice requires you to know nothing and to shrink and to call the shrinking a gift.

Stop giving that gift. Nobody wants it. It's icky.