Nice is manner, and good is character, and a bit beyond.

Often, when one is good, one is nice. Similarly, and maybe even more often, when one is nice, one is good.

It’s not guaranteed though, that simply by being nice, one is also acting for the good, greater or not.

There rarely but necessarily are those that propagate through the world a harsh sort of goodness. That unfiltered force can be visceral in a way that can easily be misconstrued as badness, and I think coarse enough that the maker must objectively be not-nice, unmistakably.

In contrast though, nice is sleepy, sluggish. It feels comfy and warm, confined to its little bubble. In a utopic democracy of niceness, niceness alone would be enough to support all of the good without a separately-defined system of good.

In our grubbier reality, nice without independently-vetted good can actually be subtly treacherous. We tend to pave over hell with fluffy marshmallows. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that s’mores came from America – maybe the stove is closer to the surface? We make ourselves feel okay by behaving like the folk from the aforethunk Utopia, as if we’re already living in it. I do hope that for most of us, we genuinely believe that our attempts at nice equate to good; I think most would say with blind confidence that they are one and the same.

On this particular point, the nice folk of the world suffer from a childlike level of innocent ignorance. I don’t hold anything against them, other than being a bit gullible for never questioning the too-good-to-be-true ease of being nice, and being able to get to sleep too easily. Accusations of a bitter insomniac.

As somebody who, looking back, has likely been guilty of a great degree of nice without good, I intend to try to be somebody who deals in good first. I’ll do my best to be nice still, but am prepared to suffer through the discomfort of not being.

Whenever I reach about this far into writing anything, I always start to get the feeling that I just have a very roundabout approach to stating the obvious.

Nice is only good when nothing’s wrong, and it is, and will be for a good/nice while, maybe for as long as we’re around for.

I think about this one a lot.