The Invoice Behind Our Niceness

There is a word we have all been raised to honour. From the time we are small we are told to be nice. Be nice to your brother. Be nice to the guest who has come to the house. We learn very early that niceness is the currency of belonging, the thing that keeps us safe, approved, and welcome in the rooms we wish to remain in.

For most of my life I prided myself on being a nice man.

What I did not see for a long time is that my niceness was rarely about the person in front of me. It was about me. It was about being liked. It was about avoiding conflict and managing how others felt so that I could remain comfortable in their company. My niceness wore the costume of love, and underneath it was quietly serving myself.

This is the religion Job lived inside, and it is the religion many of us still live inside without ever naming it. The same instinct that makes a man bargain with God makes him nice with people. Both come from the same root. Both are transactions. Both are an attempt to control an outcome by behaving correctly, so that the world will give us back the safety and the approval we are quietly hoping to secure.

Here is the distinction that has changed everything for me. Niceness is centred on what I am hoping to get. Kindness is centred on what is genuinely good. They can look identical from the outside, and they could not be more different underneath.

Niceness will tell you what you want to hear because it cannot bear to lose your favour. Kindness will tell you the truth because it loves you more than it fears your reaction. Niceness keeps the peace by avoiding everything difficult. Kindness makes peace by being willing to walk through the difficult thing with you. 

One is a performance. The other is a gift.

The trouble with a life built on niceness is that it slowly hollows us out, and we are usually the last to notice. 

We say yes when our whole being is saying no, and we call it generosity. We swallow the honest word that someone needed to hear, and we call it grace. We keep everyone comfortable and we wonder why, in the middle of all that pleasantness, we feel so strangely alone. 

Nobody can love a costume. 

They can only love a person, and the nice person has spent years making sure the real one stays hidden.

Job's friends are worth a second look here. They were not cruel men. They sat with him. They spoke at length about God. They were, in the truest sense of the word, nice. Yet not one of them was kind, because kindness would have required them to stop defending their tidy theology and simply be present to a suffering man. 

Their niceness served their own need to keep their world intact. Kindness would have cost them that comfort, and they were not willing to pay it.

Kindness costs something. 

That is precisely what makes it kindness. It does not need to be thanked, because it was never performing for an audience. It flows from a heart so settled in love that it no longer has to manufacture approval, 

and a heart like that is free to give without first calculating the return.

There is a beauty in this that goes beyond the individual. Niceness, because it is centered on the false self, can only ever serve one person. Kindness, on the other hand is centered on what is real and true, which enables it to create an environment where everyone is able to flourish. 

When I hold a healthy boundary instead of dishonestly keeping you happy, I am protecting the long health of what is between us. 

Kindness builds a world. 

Niceness only decorates a cage and calls it a home.

So I want to leave you with a question I have had to ask myself many times. 

In the moments that matter, am I being nice or am I being kind? 

The answer is rarely flattering at first. It was not flattering for me. 

Yet the moment we begin to live from the heart rather than from the fear of how we are perceived, something in us comes back to life where the people around us can also begin to breather again.

This is the big difference between Nice and Kind.

Niceness serves you

Kindness benefits the World

Consider that you and I were not made to spend our life's managing impressions. 

We were made to love and to be loved, honestly and without a contract. 

The day we lay down our niceness is the day our kindness, and our freedom, can finally begin.

PS See you next Sunday!