Niceness Is Not a Virtue

This is gonna sound strange, so bear with me. When I was young, I overvalued being nice to people. Most people have felt this at one time or another when the realization strikes that they’re being treated poorly, used as a doormat, and have had their personal boundaries systematically violated. And still, while it happens… they are nice and pleasant.

I knew what things didn’t feel right but I struggled with expressing them to other people. My boundaries existed to me, but not to anyone else. So they might as well not have existed at all.

What happened over time was that I bottled up my frustrations and gave people who abused my niceness more chances to do it again, until I’d eventually explode in anger.

A Lesson in Human Volcanism

My first job was working at an alarm company as a dispatcher. In this environment, I worked with people of all ages and a variety of temperaments.

There was one particular woman from an earlier shift who would sometimes work overtime and overlap with me. I hated working with her because of her nasty, mean attitude.

She always had something negative to say and displayed a flippant attitude toward just about everyone, but she especially enjoyed talking down to me. I was about eighteen at the time and she was in her sixties, and I could tell she hated asking for my help because of the age gap. It made her feel inferior or something, I assume.

One day as I was on the phone, I could hear her trying to get my attention to check some information for her, to which I signaled to her with my index finger to state, “One moment.”

She kept repeating herself and every time she did, I made eye contact with her, gesturing “Hold on!” until I was done with my own call.

What set me off was that, even though she was less than ten feet away from me, she started talking trash about me to the person sitting next to her–out loud–and this woman didn’t even care that I could hear her.

I was filled with rage, and as soon as I hung up the phone, I yelled and cursed her out for her blatant disrespect, causing everyone in the room to look and see why this normally quiet young man (me) was the loudest one in the room. I looked bad.

A few days after the incident, we crossed paths and she said “Hi, Adam!” with a smile on her face. I was so confused. This lady had never greeted me in the years we’d worked together.

While I don’t advocate cursing out your co-workers, this incident taught me several lessons that I passed on to my son as he got older.

Mutual Understanding Requires Some Discomfort

I learned at this moment that there is a difference between being a polite man and a “nice guy”. I saw what it looked like when I was acting like a nice guy who’d just absorb any insult or misbehavior. No one respects that sort of man, one who simply accepts this type of treatment.

That woman didn’t respect me because I didn’t respect myself, and I demonstrated that to her by never expressing boundaries for the treatment I’d tolerate. I put up with her rudeness for years, until one day I grew some balls and shut her down–once and for all.

She was kind and professional with me going forward because she knew I expected it.

People Pleasing Is a Dead-End Road

As my son got closer to being a teen I made sure that he too understood the difference between being nice and polite. Being polite means your default is cordiality and courtesy, but norms of politeness break down if you simply smile away bad behavior. Polite guys have no problem enforcing necessary punishments for crossing a known boundary and setting that same expectation for others.

I repeatedly told my son that he needs to advocate for himself and because of this, he’s stronger than a lot of young men who tend to be people pleasers.

If you grew up in the 2000s, you might remember the masterclass one Spongebob Squarepants received from Plankton about assertiveness…

You have to be assertive in your self-advocacy for appropriate conduct and punish anyone who crosses that line of reasonable treatment. Punishment can be as simple as the cold shoulder or as involved as a verbal rebuke.

Tolerance is in general a good thing, but what you tolerate is a signifier of how much you respect yourself, and the more you put up with, the less people will respect you.

Adam B. Coleman is an author and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. He writes on Substack at Speaking Wrong At The Right Time.