Difference between Being Nice and Being Friendly

When one goes to school, or some other place where many people congregate at one time, he or she will often find that there are numerous “sects” between different “types” of people. For example, there are the nerdy, geeky people that tend to hang out together as one group, where as jocks and the like tend to hang with their own kind, in a sense. It’s almost as if these sorts of groups are mere representations of differing species! But we all know that that is not true. Whether you’re a geek or jock, you are a human just the same. Anyways, continuing on with these differentiating factors that we humans have basically invented for ourselves, there seem to be two of these major factors that, unlike being a kind of person, like a nerd or workaholic, are either one or the other, in a sense.

Of course, by factors that can be only one or the other, I’m not referring to “hot and cold” or “up and down,” or anything of that matter. Instead, I am referring to the qualities of nice and mean. You may say to yourself that you can discern the difference between nice and mean pretty easily. But is that really so? Can you really spot the differences between nice and mean? Sure, you probably would be able to call someone mean if they, say, used some sort of verbal abuse on one or some other form of physical harm. But what about nice? You may say that being nice is simply smiling at someone as they, say, spontaneously smile at you while walking down a sidewalk, but is that really nice? What if they had some sort surgery on their face go wrong, and their smiling is nothing more than a controlled but constant wince in pain? Though you’d probably argue that indeed you would’ve smiled, therefore you were still being nice. But, once again, is that really so? Wouldn’t it be true that you would’ve felt awkward if you didn’t smile? Wouldn’t that be your true incentive for smiling back, not for the sake of that other person feeling better knowing that they made one more person in the world happy for a bit? Therefore, what you did just then probably wasn’t exactly nice. With that in mind, it must be true that you probably don’t entirely understand the concept of being nice. With that thought in mind, that must also signify that there are other concepts related to “nice” that you must not be able to quite understand if you don’t completely understand “niceness.”

Such concepts that would relate to “nice” would include the concept of being friend. What would truly define the nature of being friendly to another person? Would it mean something along the lines of giving someone flowers spontaneously? Maybe so, maybe not. You see, it would probably not be so because the only time you would most likely do such a thing would be when, say, the person who’s receiving the bouquet has close relate who recently died. In that sort of scenario, you’d probably find it mandatory to give such a gift, with little later thought of giving a gift to that person for the sake of being friendly. Therefore, that particular meaning is invalid. With those things said, I would define being friendly as something general but powerful. Being friendly, in my opinion, is when you perform actions towards another for the sole purpose of improving the other’s life, whether it is socially, financially, or whatever. Wouldn’t that make sense? It would cover things from chilling with your friend after he or she has just had a horrible ending to a relationship of theirs to just meeting them for lunch during lunch break. This definition, though to a lesser magnitude, would also pretty much cover concept of being nice, too. In my opinion, these definitions are perfect to go by when you want to be friendly or nice. I just wish these definitions were demonstrated in a larger degree. But unfortunately, there are some inhibitors in the way.

Such inhibitors that cause this problem are found everywhere – from malls, to department stores, and even in TV advertisements. What I’m talking about are commercial manipulations that the Industry puts on the public. For example, time and time again, they want you to “buy, buy, buy” their products because they are “cheap, cheap, cheap” every Christmas. They make you believe that not doing so would be something that’s neither nice nor friendly to the ones who would receive the gift. Thus, they distort your perception of these things. They essentially make you forget that a true “gift” must come from the heart rather than some mass-producing factory. I myself know that I have this similar, distorted perception. I am just thankful that I now know about this issue in the first place. Now you do, too.

Here I have mentioned how we humans like to divide ourselves into groups based on qualities each of us possesses. I then said how we divide ourselves, in particular, on the basis of being kind or cruel. I then talked about the difference between those two qualities, as well as how they are often misconceived. I then go into why they are probably misconceived, with it being because of manipulative commercial propaganda.