Alivox on Niceness

I currently live half the year in Seattle, where the summers are very nice. The people here are always very nice, winter or summer, and it's nice to live somewhere so nice, where everybody's always so nice, and even the weather is nice half the year. I live in a nice house on a nice street, and I have to admit my life here is very nice. So why do I feel like I'm trapped in junior high?

I've lived in a number of other cities, but until I moved here I never really understood what "nice " meant. Seattlites have elevated niceness to an artform - nay, to the entire basis of civil society. That's nice for them, but what have they given up in exchange? That question will be the topic of this essay.

Seattle is not unique in this distinction, and in fact the vast hinterland of the USA from the George Washington Bridge to the Oakland Bay Bridge is all very nice. Incidentally, that's the same part of the country where Miracle Whip outsells mayonnaise ten to one. Coincidence? I wonder.

But Seattle has to be the world capital of niceness, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are all cloudy till May. So here's a postcard from the new frontier, land of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Ichiro, Kurt Cobain and nice ness. We're gonna call the film version "Deepless in Seattle".

I'm originally from New York, although I've lived in numerous other places around the world. We New Yorkers are called many things - some even complimentary - but rarely is nice among them. Of course there are lots of nice people in New York, and most people everywhere are nice some of the time, but because New York is so diverse and so dense, niceness is not the dominant social form.

So what is the opposite of niceness? It's not rudeness or nastiness - those take too much effort. Niceness is fundamentally a concern for the feelings of others, including how they perceive us, so the opposite is simply a lack of concern. I've decided to use the word brusque for this lack of concern; it's a fine word we don't hear too often, and it sounds halfway between bluff "good-naturedly abrupt or frank" and gruff "rough; surly" or blunt "abrupt in address or manner" [all quotes are Webster's].

But all these definitions focus too much on the superficial, while I want to discuss the deep reflexes of these two contrasting styles. Niceness and brusqueness are much more than conversational gambits; they reflect fundamental differences in how we approach life. I didn't understand that when I first moved to Seattle many years ago, and in fact because the natives speak English, eat with their fork in the right hand, watch baseball, and share many other aspects of my culture, it took me a long time to understand how different they are, and they still don't understand how different I am. Without that appreciation, communication is almost impossible.

So I present the following as a guide for brusque people moving to Seattle or other nice places, and for nice people who want some perspective on those rude newcomers. And maybe both groups of us can learn something about ourselves in the process.

Lesson 1: Silence means "no", and so does "yes"

Let's say you're throwing a party, and you invite some nice people you know. Of course, they're delighted to be invited, and they assure you they'll be there. But they never show up, never call, and never apologize or otherwise refer to it afterwards. Brusque people might be puzzled by this behavior, especially after it happens repeatedly with many people. What's going on?

Here's the explanation: nice people wouldn't want to disappoint you when you invite them by telling you that they can't come, so they say yes - after all, they are genuinely pleased to be invited. This yes has nothing at all to do with the question of whether they intend to come - it's a polite yes. They may or may not want to come, or they may genuinely not know, but in any case they're going to say yes to the invitation - to do otherwise would be rude.

This principle goes much deeper than party invitations, and it's just as much a stumbling block in nice/brusque interactions as the word hai is between Japanese and Americans. Since nice people don't allow themselves to express negative emotions or be the bearer of bad news, silence plays those roles . Here are some true-story examples:

• Another Easterner I know runs a 10-man studio for an architecture firm. Once, they were given six months to finish a fairly large project, so he divided the work up among the team members. As everybody worked away, he would periodically ask them how it was going, and they all assured him it was going fine.
  Towards the end of the six months, they needed to start integrating their work, and he discovered to his disbelief that two of the team members had gotten stuck early in the project and not made any real progress at all for months. But they hadn't wanted to tell him - had in fact deceived him - because that wouldn't be nice.
• I once gave an ex-girlfriend a reference for a job with a guy I knew. He hired her, and the arrangement apparently flourished for a year, although I had little contact with either. At the end of the year, she had a legitimate gripe about a bonus, but rather than bring it up with him, she decided just to take the money she felt she was due and run.
  When he noticed that she had cleaned out both her office and the firm's bank account (over a weekend), he was fairly peeved ( understatement), and called me up to cuss me out for my reference - which I felt was deserved. In response, I contacted her to try to convince her to do the right thing by him - her reaction was to seek (and get) a court injunction preventing further contact by me!
• A former coworker of mine decided to cut off all contact with all of us who had worked with her, without saying anything. Another of us got married, and as the wedding approached I sent her a few emails about it, not realizing they were unwelcome. Finally, she emailed me angrily back accusing me of deliberately ignoring her silence - she was genuinely vexed that I had forced her to tell me explicitly that she wanted to hear no more from any of us.
• My living situation has brought me into contact with a succession of nice young women with whom I have no romantic involvement. As a group, they're quite varied, but one thing they all have in common is no friendships with ex-boyfriends: once a guy gets the gong, he's ancient history. (I, on the other hand, am friends with most of my ex-girlfriends, some even from decades ago.)
• I once spent a week in Paris with a nice woman, but although we both had a good time and parted on good terms, it didn't really work out. Sure enough, I soon discovered that my calls and emails weren't being returned.
• I once made the acquaintance of a couple who taught swing dancing, and they talked me into trying it. They offered to give an introductory lesson to a group at my house, and I rounded up 14 wannabees, with another 6 saying they'd like to but couldn't make it that night. It was a rousing success - everybody had a good time - and when it was over I asked how many would like to do it again: they all did. So we agreed on a night when almost everybody could make it again, and I even invited the 6 who hadn't made it the first time. You guessed it: a total of 2 showed up.

But the real price of this arrangement is paid by the Seattlites themselves, who have no mechanism at their disposal to rectify any of the small hitches that inevitably come up in every situation. They live in a world in which the first hiccup means death to a relationship, a job, or any other endeavor, and consequently they lead very shallow lives, afraid to reveal their flaws and dissatisfactions, and in fact blaming themselves. Denial is their oxygen.

Lesson 2: Communication is about intent, not content

You know that famous Far Side cartoon where the first panel shows a man scolding his dog, Ginger, and the second panel shows that the dog hears only its name? That's sometimes what Seattle is like.

As I'll discuss below, critical thinking is completely absent in Seattle, and of course so is criticism itself. You even have to be very careful about complaining about life's small hassles, like traffic. Seattle has terrible traffic problems, about as bad as Los Angeles with a fifth of the population, and they resolutely vote down any attempts to address the issue. But if an outsider like me makes a negative comment about the traffic, well, he's criticizing us! Who does he think he is, anyway? Why doesn't he go back where he came from, if he doesn't like it here?

• Two women I know had a conflict over a guy, but they both wanted to stay friends. But one was brusque, and she kept trying to get the other to sit down for a heart-to-heart talk so they could iron out their differences, put the past behind them, and really get to know one another.
  For the other, a very nice native Seattlite, this is the recipe for a nightmare! She doesn't want anyone to "get to know the real her" - her whole life is spent trying to live up to an impossible ideal of cheerful bonhomie, and the last thing she wants is that shell pierced when she's feeling less-than- cheerful. In the end, the friendship died.
• I went to dinner with my neighbors, who are very nice. Over the course of dinner, I revealed some of my opinions about Seattle, as I'm doing here. They were personally insulted, they thought there was something wrong with me, and they couldn't imagine why anyone would want to have any contact with someone as nasty as me. And since then, they've been polite, but cold.
  Nobody likes to hear criticism of themselves, but if someone says they hate New York, I'd say "too bad for you", although I admit freely that much of the criticism I've heard of New York (and New Yorkers) is completely valid. But I don't feel personally insulted by criticism of New York, any more than I do when someone tells me they don't like sushi (yum!).

Lesson 3: The nail that stands up, gets hammered

You may think that striving to be better is a universal trait, despite the tremendous variety in what people consider "better" to mean. In fact, the assumption that other people are motivated to advance their interests and improve their circumstances is deeply embedded in most interaction.

Surprisingly, this assumption often seems to be violated in Seattle. People not only often seem to make life choices that clearly worsen their situation, but they also reveal that they consider any ambition or effort to be an insult to everyone else. If you want to be better than you are, you're implying that there's something wrong with being like everyone else.

• I used to go out with a woman who worked in a department of about ten coworkers. They used to get together occasionally for a weekend brunch or evening barbecue, and I would get introduced to those I didn't know. I began to notice that the manager would change about every six months, and was usually younger and less experienced than the others in the department.
  The explanation is that none of the veterans wanted to be manager. They would say that it was more work and more stress, and not worth the extra money, but the more important consideration is that to become the manager of your longtime coworkers would put you "above" them, making you look haughty. It would also put you in a position where you might have to be the bearer of bad news (e.g. layoffs, or even performance reviews), which is socially unacceptable. So they always made the new guy be manager!
• Another woman I know is struggling to adapt to Seattle culture. She comes from a solid Midwestern background, but the women in her circle of friends in Seattle are all trailer trash: very nice on the surface, but the kind of people who go out with ex-cons, druggies, and married men, and are always reading their email or searching their glove compartments in an effort to catch them cheating.
  My friend is caught between two worlds. On the one hand, she recognizes that there's supposed to be an emotional aspect to relationships that her friends are missing, but on the other hand she can't bring herself to reject that world of "catching and keeping a man". It's her example that has taught me how hard it is to live in Seattle outside the dominant culture.
• Believe it or not, Seattlites call Californians superficial. There is a substantial population of displaced Californians in Seattle (as there is everywhere in the West), and they are widely reviled for their name-dropping, their materialism, and for caring too much about how they look. We New Yorkers also look down on Californians as superficial, and for the same reasons, but it always puzzled me that Seattlites felt the same way because, frankly, those are the things they care about, too.
  It took me a while to realize what was going on. Seattlites don't revile Californians for their goals themselves, but for having the ambition to advance them - they seem to be "trying too hard", a mark of insecurity. The Seattlite would be happy to look better or have a nicer car, but not without a story of how he got it without trying.
• Interesting is not a good thing in Seattle (which is the complete opposite of New York and Paris). Interesting means different, perhaps intentionally so, and that implies you think there's something wrong with everyone else. The word "interesting" is even pronounced differently in Seattle: drawn out, with lots of pitch modulation.
  Much better than interesting is reassuring. Seattlites live according to precepts that strain credulity, to put it mildly. It's kind of a giant version of "The Emperor's New Clothes", where as long as nobody mentions that the emperor is really naked, everybody believes there's something wrong with them if they can't see the emperor's fine new robes. In those circumstances, nobody wants an interesting discussion of his outfit - they just want you to agree with them how nice it is.

Lesson 4: Paying attention is a burden

Sometimes, it's great to relax: to kick back with a beer, put on some music, and not have to think about anything. But it can also be great to do something, especially something active that engages your mind and body. The trick is to find the right balance between those two extremes.

We all know that if you don't exercise your body, you'll get out of shape - use it or lose it. That's true of lots of other things, too: speaking a foreign language, swimming, dancing, integral calculus ... even sex! I find that, contrary to popular myth, if I don't get laid for a while, I completely forget about sex until a fun night reminds me.

Well, attention - our ability to pay attention - works the same way. If you pay attention to lots of things all day long, it gets easier and easier, while if you only fire up the old noggin once or twice a day, it takes some effort. To people who don't understand this - like Seattlites - it may seem that "having" to pay attention ALL DAY LONG - like New Yorkers - is a stressful ordeal for Type A workaholics, just like having to socialize with other people, like at a party.

So imagine that you're waiting to make a left turn at a four way intersection, and a car is coming from your left: he has priority, so you wait for him to pass. But he ends up turning right, and if he had signalled that, you could also have made your turn and been on your way. Why didn't he? He wasn't paying attention, and after all, why should he signal?

And yet if you gave the citizens of Seattle a multiple-choice test asking whether people should illuminate their right turn signals before making a right turn, I'm sure Seattle would score among the highest cities in the country: they know the right answer and they're eager to please when the spotlight is on them.

They just don't like paying attention.

Lesson 5: Critical thinking is negative

Seattle has one of the worst baseball teams in the Majors, despite a high payroll and a beautiful new stadium. They achieve losing seasons twice as often as winning ones, and are the only AL team never to have won the pennant. One problem is that their fans continue to support them, loyally, no matter how bad they are. After all, they're OUR team.

Seattle is not the only city like that, and loyalty isn't the worst flaw. But unflinching support is not healthy for anyone, especially if it sustains maladaptive behavior.

• A woman friend of mine is on a sad treadmill of desperate searching for romantic fulfillment, followed by an inevitable crushing rejection which defies her explanatory powers. The one thing that she and her supportive friends are all sure of is that it's not her fault (and also that the guy didn't deserve her anyway).
• For a while, I was good friends with two married women. When one of their marriages began to fall apart (nothing to do with me!), the other consistently took her side and was very supportive, along with many of her other friends. The end result was behavior that led to the worst possible result, at which point all the supportive advice-givers simply disappeared - and they see nothing odd about that.

There may be some of you who see nothing wrong with the behavior I'm decrying. In fact, you may think it's me it sounds like there's something wrong with.

You're as correct as I am, in your culture, and I bet you're very nice, too.

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