In my experience, most people who desperately cling to “nice” are cowards.
From a meme:
“Not everyone gets the same version of me.One person might tell you I have an amazing and beautiful soul. Another might tell you I’m a cold blooded asshole. Believe them both. I don’t treat people badly. I treat them accordingly”.
I am nice/polite/civilized until provoked. Don’t make me your enemy, because the less than kind parts of my Scots, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking heritage will rear their ugly heads.
I had the nice driven out of me a long time ago by assholes who tried (and sometimes succeeded to one extent or another) to take advantage of the fact I was a generally nice guy. Now, between having developed a healthy suspicion of others and their motives, plus having cut down the number of people I associate with in a friendly manner to the bare bones, I no longer have to deal with that bullshit.
Right now I have a buddy who is getting royally fucked over by his dad, with whom he is an “equal” partner in a business they run. Not only is he being taken advantage of financially in this arrangement, but is doing 99% of the work while his dad is playing golf, going on mini-vacations multiple times year, and otherwise screwing around not contributing the the business, other than some startup capital. Meanwhile, his parents are getting divorced (in their mid-late 70’s, for fucks sake) after being separated for nearly 20 years. This has thrown him right in the shit, as his mom relies on him regularly for assistance with various and sundry things, and his dad is now trying to force him to take a side in the divorce proceedings, obviously hoping to get the upper hand. That he has some leverage by way of the business partnership is a complicating factor.
This guy is in his mid 50’s, and his parents are both abusing his good nature in a disgusting example of codependency run amok. He is having arguments regularly with his wife now over the way he is being used (and his wife has emotional problems, plus major family drama of her own screwing things up in the background). I’ve tried to tell him he needs to grow a pair (in less abrasive terms) and start demanding his interests be respected, but he has set himself up perfectly for a world of shit by being married to an.unstable woman, and being involved in a business partnership with his dad, who is clearly just using him for financial gain, with no regard whatsoever for his own son’s well being.
The whole thing disgusts me, and the worst part is he’s stuck. His only real option to get relief at this stage would be to tell everyone around him to go get fucked and disappear, just letting the fallout occur as it may. I’m at the point of expecting that sometime in the foreseeable future he could eat a bullet, as the pressure he’s under has gotten too burdensome. My attempts to “enlighten” him are met with platitudes about how he’s “doing fine, just working through some shit.”
But he’s not working through it, he’s getting buried, at about 4 years and counting now of being screwed over, mostly by members of his own family.as things have deteriorated around him. I’ve resigned myself to the fact I can’t get him to see he has been relegated to little more than an abuse bitch, and while I still try to give him constructive advice, I’m almost out of patience even to do that. His life is a case study in allowing oneself to get steamrolled by trying to solve everyone else’s problems.
Life made sure that I’m neither a nice person, nor a good person.
Being nice made me an asshole.
Me too Veeshir
I’m nice. Until I’m not.
In my experience, most people who desperately cling to “nice” are cowards.
From a meme:
“Not everyone gets the same version of me.One person might tell you I have an amazing and beautiful soul. Another might tell you I’m a cold blooded asshole. Believe them both. I don’t treat people badly. I treat them accordingly”.
I am nice/polite/civilized until provoked. Don’t make me your enemy, because the less than kind parts of my Scots, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking heritage will rear their ugly heads.
I had the nice driven out of me a long time ago by assholes who tried (and sometimes succeeded to one extent or another) to take advantage of the fact I was a generally nice guy. Now, between having developed a healthy suspicion of others and their motives, plus having cut down the number of people I associate with in a friendly manner to the bare bones, I no longer have to deal with that bullshit.
Right now I have a buddy who is getting royally fucked over by his dad, with whom he is an “equal” partner in a business they run. Not only is he being taken advantage of financially in this arrangement, but is doing 99% of the work while his dad is playing golf, going on mini-vacations multiple times year, and otherwise screwing around not contributing the the business, other than some startup capital. Meanwhile, his parents are getting divorced (in their mid-late 70’s, for fucks sake) after being separated for nearly 20 years. This has thrown him right in the shit, as his mom relies on him regularly for assistance with various and sundry things, and his dad is now trying to force him to take a side in the divorce proceedings, obviously hoping to get the upper hand. That he has some leverage by way of the business partnership is a complicating factor.
This guy is in his mid 50’s, and his parents are both abusing his good nature in a disgusting example of codependency run amok. He is having arguments regularly with his wife now over the way he is being used (and his wife has emotional problems, plus major family drama of her own screwing things up in the background). I’ve tried to tell him he needs to grow a pair (in less abrasive terms) and start demanding his interests be respected, but he has set himself up perfectly for a world of shit by being married to an.unstable woman, and being involved in a business partnership with his dad, who is clearly just using him for financial gain, with no regard whatsoever for his own son’s well being.
The whole thing disgusts me, and the worst part is he’s stuck. His only real option to get relief at this stage would be to tell everyone around him to go get fucked and disappear, just letting the fallout occur as it may. I’m at the point of expecting that sometime in the foreseeable future he could eat a bullet, as the pressure he’s under has gotten too burdensome. My attempts to “enlighten” him are met with platitudes about how he’s “doing fine, just working through some shit.”
But he’s not working through it, he’s getting buried, at about 4 years and counting now of being screwed over, mostly by members of his own family.as things have deteriorated around him. I’ve resigned myself to the fact I can’t get him to see he has been relegated to little more than an abuse bitch, and while I still try to give him constructive advice, I’m almost out of patience even to do that. His life is a case study in allowing oneself to get steamrolled by trying to solve everyone else’s problems.