I had a nice weekend.
I had a nice weekend, and it was really nice.
I had a nice weekend, and it was really nice. It was really nice that my weekend was so nice.
I had a nice weekend, and it was really nice. It was really nice that my weekend was so nice. Isn’t it so nice that I had such a nice weekend?
I hate nice weekends. For about six months of my life in 2021 all I had were nice weekends, and they were miserable. I would wake up every Saturday at no particular time, just whenever I felt like rolling out of bed. I would ease into my morning with some YouTube videos or a news article on current events from which I was very removed or some guitar stumming with no real structure or aim to it. I’d make my first meal of the day, something I enjoyed but nothing too special or difficult to make.
Then I’d walk into a lovely little town by the sea, with petite beaches on either side of it, and I would grab a tea or a scone or a muffin or wander through a book store or go for a walk along the coast. Or, if I was really feeling it, I’d do all three in one day. (Man, the days were really nice when I had the chance to do all three!) Then I would return home, maybe stop by the market on the way back to pick up some cheese or bread, and I’d cook myself a nice dinner, not so healthy that it didn’t taste good but healthy enough that I could go to bed without feeling uncomfortably full.
I’d always make sure to go to bed at a fairly reasonable hour, after doing some light reading or something like that, so that I could be well rested for the day tomorrow. And that was it – my nice little weekend.
Those weekends were, by all measures, very nice. They were comfortable and pleasant and lacking in stress.
And I think most people would say, unfortunately, that they long to spend all of their weekends as I did for those 6 months, to fill their time with nice little activities that are pleasant and in no way challenging, to lead comfortable lives in which nothing super bad (or super great, for that matter) ever happens, to just try to be pretty happy all the time, forever.
People see such weekends as a break from the stressful, not-so-nice parts of life that they encounter every day. To a certain extent this is true. Life is often terribly stressful and tiring, and sometimes life is downright awful.
I do not mean to say that I dislike when life is not stressful or tiring or awful. I have an interesting relationship with suffering, but I am not a masochist or a sadist. Nor do I prefer for my life to be stressful and or miserable, if I can help it. However, I do mean to say that I hate when life is only ever nice. These two statements, that I hate when life is miserable and when life is nice, are not mutually exclusive.
However, people take such statements to be in conflict because they mistakenly conflate what is nice with what is good. It goes something like:
Things that are nice are usually pleasant.
Things that are pleasant (i.e., things that give us pleasure) are usually pretty good.
∴ Nice things are good.
OR
Things that are nice are not bad.
Good things are not bad.
∴ Nice things are good things.
OR
Being nice is a virtue.
Being virtuous is good.
∴ Being nice is good.
Of course, none of these arguments are valid, nor are they sound. But that is the point. People jump from assumption to assumption without thinking too deeply about whether such assumptions are true or (regardless of the truth of said assumptions) whether such leaps are justifiable. I could go on, but I will spare you any further analysis because, when arranged into logical (in a technical sense) arguments, it is obvious the two words ‘good’ and ‘nice’ do not mean the same thing.
Though, confusion about the actual meanings of these words is obviously not the problem. This is not an issue of semantics. Anyone, when asked point blank about whether ‘nice’ and ‘good’ mean the same thing, will answer in the negative. Why have two distinct words that have the exact same meaning? Not to get too Fregean but even synonyms offer slightly different senses of the same referent, and in doing so they engender slightly different meanings.
Rather, the real problem exists insofar as people act in ways which treat niceness and goodness as, essentially, synonyms. That is, they act as though niceties are things which might serve as worthy substitutes for goodness, as that which we should all strive after in our lives. In other words, people treat niceties and niceness as ultimate normative ends in themselves. They tell themselves that what we should aim for is the comfort of things being nice.
I find that this aim goes hand in hand with, or perhaps springs forth from, a certain sort of assumption that achieving comfort, an ease of both physical and emotional difficulty, should be humanity’s chief concern. A more insidious lie has never been told.
For those six months of nice weekends, I was plagued by the feeling that I had not done anything. Strictly speaking, of course, this was not true. I finished books and made new recipes and got my steps in and stayed healthy. I did all those things that are necessary for the upkeep of a so-called nice life. In fact, all I did on those weekends was only ever in the services of maintaining niceties. By the standards of those who believe that one’s ultimate end is to have a nice life, I was incredibly successful.
Nevertheless, my feeling that I had done, was doing, and would only ever have the opportunity to do nothing remained. For the longest while this feeling baffled me, seeing as though I constantly filled my seemingly endless free time with activity, until all at once it struck me. I realized immediately that my all actions throughout those weekends were meaningless. They served no purpose other than to extend my present state of comfort indefinitely. There was no growth, no strain, no purpose, just maintenance and therefore, just action without pursuit, action devoid of meaning. Those weekends I moved with no direction, something worse than the endless undertaking of movement for movements sake – movement for the sake of stagnancy.
I had been walking around a padded room humming lullabies to myself, and I had failed to notice because everyone around me filled their lives with the same exact drivel. We had hummed one another into a comfortable stupor, content to spend our lives in a safe, scenic, comfortable cell full of easy-to-digest media and scones. It took me a while to come to my senses, but many people I know still live in that place. Not the physical town that served as my personal prison of niceties but the oblivious state of being engulfed by what is nice, oh so nice.
Such a prosect disgusts me now. Perhaps this is a mean thing to say, that only looking for life to be nice disgusts me, but it is the truth. I am disgusted that I was once resigned to such a state. I am disgusted to look around and see so many who are contented with the same sort of existence. I am disgusted that we do not hunger for more than merely a nice life. We spend our time running from discomfort, bandying ourselves about from one merely pleasurable experience to the next, always in pursuit of niceties and nothing at all; the two are one in the same.
And here is where we might return to the difference between ‘nice’ and ‘good’. For what is good, unlike what is nice, necessitates an aim on our part. Goodness, despite what thinkers like Bentham would have us believe, is not brought about merely via the induction of pleasure. It comes about as the result of having an aim and in pursuing that aim bringing the world into harmony, of transforming things in the world from the way they exist now to the way that they ought to exist.
Sometimes this harmony of goodness requires unpleasantries – see the mother who gives up the pleasure of a full night’s sleep in order to care for her newborn baby or the person who wakes up at four in the morning to take their friend to the airport. These are trivial examples, but they reveal a deeper pattern. Pleasure is inherently inwardly focused, chained to the self and one’s perception of it. The same is true of pain, and thus, to define these phenomena as the root of all morality is to firmly set the perception of oneself at the center of our normative considerations.
In turn, morality becomes a question of the perception of how one feels. Questions of how we ought to act collapse into questions of which action would seem to make us feel better or which action would lead to so-called self-realization. This tendency, however, strikes me as very akin to the sort of thinking that underpins anxiety disorders, a constant negative perception of the self to the point where no thoughts about any subject at any time can be separated from the relation to oneself.
One may say that the antidote to this sort of problem would be to replace that negative perception of the self with a positive one. But the problem still remains – the focus on the self as such. In replacing a perpetual negative awareness of the self with one that is just as perpetual only positive, we breed narcissism. The answer lies in removing the perpetuality and centrality of the focus on self.
In taking on what I have playfully called ‘not-so-nice things’, in focusing not merely on what is pleasant or painful, we are encouraged to look beyond positive self-perception as the defining moral consideration. We instead learn to look outside of ourselves, to things greater than ourselves, things worthy of our perpetual attention. That which is outside of us may serve as a proper aim, but to aim inwardly is to implode. By turning from an immediate focus on the perception of self we move closer to bringing about the way things ought to be with respect to ourselves and the world. And, this habit scales across all actions trivial or significant.
Niceties on the other hand never require anything other than a perception of self. There is no regard for the transformation of what is into what it ought to be. There is only concern for making what is as tolerable as possible, and this is done by ensuring that the self as it exists is as cosy as we can make it. We are drawn slowly into a blackhole, brought about by attention that has collapsed in on itself. For attaining what is nice requires us to sacrifice all else at the alter of that which is comfortable for the present self, diminishingly unchallenging, and ultimately, meaningless.
In our niceness we are aimless, but at least we’re comfortable.