I see signs everywhere, stickers, t-shirts, YouTubers saying at the end of their videos "be kind" "kindness is everything". Kindness is overrated. What they mean when they say this is don't be confrontational, don't be assertive, succumb. It encourages weakness. Strength should be the priority.
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Kindness is a beautiful thing and one of the highest virtues you can have. Problem is it's conflated with niceness. Christ was always kind but wasn't always nice.
Kindness is mostly superficial. It is good, but doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good person.
Love your neighbor as yourself. Love is far more powerful because it speaks to who you are as a person, and love can be tough and may seem harsh at first glance, but true love is necessarily good.
That's essentially what I was trying to convey by differentiating kindness and niceness. Kindness being what achieves the best outcome even if it's not necessarily nice to the individual while niceness is performative and not necessarily in someone's best interest.
Could you give an ELI5 for Kindness vs Niceness?
To be fair, this is more how I subjectively see it. Niceness would be telling your friend an outfit looks good on them when it's really not. Kindness is telling them to change into something else. You can often be both nice and kind when a situation allows it but they can also mean different things. When being nice would prevent you from being kind, it's much easier to just be nice even though being kind has greater benefit.