October 5, National Be Nice Day, and nobody can say who started it
The websites that list the day agree on the date and on very little else. One concedes that the exact origins are unknown. Another says the day began as a bright idea to put more positivity into the internet, then admits in the following sentence that the beginnings are hazy. I find that fitting. A day devoted to decency has no founder and no press release, only a date that people keep handing along.
Some sites try to fill the gap with history, and the results feel strained
A community paper in Salford ties the day to the Treaty of Kadesh, negotiated in 1258 BCE. A timeline site offers different neighbors: the UN’s 1981 proposal for an International Day of Peace and the 2000 film Pay It Forward. None of it shows anyone choosing October 5. Neighbors on a timeline are not ancestors. The Kadesh treaty is a real and remarkable document, a settlement between the Egyptian king Ramesses II and the Hittite ruler Hattusili III, though that detail is my own background knowledge, and I found nothing connecting it to a day about being pleasant to strangers.
The calendar already has relatives. Good Neighbor Day, on September 28, goes back to Becky Mattson of Arizona in the 1970s, and in 1978 President Jimmy Carter proclaimed a national version. Say Something Nice Day lands on June 1 and is said to have started in Charleston, South Carolina. World Kindness Day follows on November 13. A cynic sees a society that has outsourced its manners to the almanac. I see a lot of people who keep feeling the need to remind each other, which tells me the habit is worth the trouble.
There is a standard sneer at the word nice. Kind, the argument goes, is the serious virtue because it costs something, while nice is a thin lacquer over a bad mood. The distinction holds up in part. Kindness sometimes means telling a friend what she does not want to hear, and politeness alone will never manage that. But the sneer overlooks how much of ordinary life runs on the lacquer. Picture a bakery clerk who says good morning to two hundred people before nine o’clock. Each of them receives a small signal that they are not an obstacle. Multiply that by every counter and bus line in a city and you arrive at what people mean when they say a place feels livable.
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Niceness has a darker twin, which is conflict avoidance. Most of us have worked somewhere that treated agreeableness as a virtue and honesty as a breach of etiquette, and we know how that ends: a meeting where everyone agrees and a parking lot where nobody does. If Be Nice Day means anything, it cannot mean swallowing the truth. A manner can be gentle while the substance stays firm. The research I read concerns acts of help, such as favors and rides, and says nothing in favor of agreeing with everyone. Kindness is also harder when you are tired, broke or grieving, and a holiday that scolds those people is a bad holiday.
What does the research say?
Modest things, and I would rather report them as modest. A social scientist writing in The Conversation describes a study in which people who followed through on kind acts outside their normal routine gained more in wellbeing and mental health than people who spent the time treating themselves, and their anxiety and depression fell. The follow-up work suggests that breaking routine matters: driving a neighbor to a doctor’s appointment did more for happiness than helping a spouse with the dishes, and variety in the acts helped too. A review of twenty-seven experiments, summarized by a Roanoke College psychology blog, found that kindness improves the wellbeing of the person doing it, although the effect appears slight.
Small is the part I find persuasive. A claim that a kind gesture cures depression would be false and would deserve the eye-roll it gets. The researcher is careful to say that kind acts are no universal remedy for emotional needs. A claim that deliberate kindness nudges the giver upward by a little, reliably, at almost no cost, is believable. Whether those nudges add up across a workplace or a street is my argument rather than anyone’s data, but I think it is the right bet.
The most useful practical advice I found comes from researchers at Kindness.org and Oxford University, as reported by the site Lady Freethinker. They advise aiming at specific acts for specific kinds of people instead of merely resolving to be kinder, and joining a group, such as a volunteering team, so that a standing commitment keeps producing occasions to help. Anyone who has abandoned a January gym plan knows why vagueness fails. A vow made on October 5 tends to evaporate by lunch. A named act for a named person survives a busy Monday.
Even tiny doses seem to register
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An Oxford study found that a week of kindness activities was enough to raise happiness, and in one healthcare waiting room, participants shown kindness-themed media instead of commercial children’s television reported better moods and more generosity. I would not build a policy on a waiting room. I do find it hard to dismiss the image of a roomful of people waiting for care, made slightly warmer by a video.
The day has hazards of its own. One of the pages that came up when I searched suggests marking it by buying ergonomic furniture for your staff, or a standing desk for a friend who works from home. The page is hosted by a furniture seller called Flexispot. I do not think the retailer is a villain, but a holiday about free goodwill arriving with a product recommendation shows how quickly a gentle idea gets harnessed. The versions of the day worth keeping cost nothing, which is also why they are hard to sell.
Niceness fails easily on a screen. A stranger in a comment thread has no face, and nothing in the exchange reminds you that she has one. Sites promoting the day push hashtags and social posts, and I am wary of kindness as content, since posting that you were nice is a different act from being nice. Still, the instinct to aim the day at the internet is sound, because that is where a great many people now meet strangers and where the courtesies of a hallway disappear.
Here is my own position, which no source supplied. A society runs on a background level of assumed good faith: the sense that the driver behind you means no harm and that the clerk will not punish you for asking twice. Nobody legislates it. It gets built from small courtesies, mostly by people who are never thanked, and it gets spent down by every sneer and every needless cruelty. The reliably pleasant person is doing maintenance on something that is slow to build and quick to break. So here is a plan for a Monday. Pick one person and decide the act before you leave the house. Make it something outside your routine, since routine-breaking acts did more for happiness in that research, and make it different from whatever you did last time. Skip the hashtag. By the time you finish reading this, a bus driver somewhere has said good morning to a few hundred strangers. Say it back.
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