The Case for Kindness Over Niceness
On making new friends and the PNW freeze
Human connection is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, particularly along the lines of friendship and community-building, so when several synchronous things occurred this week I knew I had to write about it.
Part way through the week I attended a book club discussion at work. A group of a dozen or so women have been gathering biweekly for the past couple months to discuss Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. It’s put on by the Women of Nike employee resource group that I’m part of; so while technically a function of the workplace, it’s entirely voluntary and a safe space to discuss matters away from our day jobs.
A really engaging discussion ensued on the concept of niceness versus kindness. What is the difference, you ask?
In her chapter titled “Take No Shit,” Luvvie argues that we spend too much time worrying about being perceived as nice by other people. We people please and quiet our true opinions in order to avoid conflict or “ruffling feathers,” putting niceness above our own needs.
She posits that we should focus on being kind instead of nice.
“To be kind is to be generous, fair, honest, helpful, altruistic, gracious, tolerant, understanding, humble, giving, vulnerable, magnanimous, service-driven. To be nice is to smile a lot and be chatty with random strangers. Nice is talking about the weather. Kind is caring about whether someone has an umbrella in case it rains.
People have niceness and kindness mixed up. Niceness might mean saying positive things. But kindness is doing positive things: being thoughtful and considerate, prioritizing people's humanity over everything else.”1
It was a distinction I had never considered before.
When it came up during the book club discussion, the commentary quickly evolved from Luvvie's description to how this difference shows up in people's daily lives, specifically in the context of living in the Portland Metro area.
Portland has a lot of transplants, its population having grown more than 10% in the last ten years.2 Nike especially has a lot of them since they recruit nationwide and offer a handsome relocation package (sometimes I wonder how much Nike has single-handedly contributed to the population growth since it’s one of the state’s largest employers).
As a result, a lot of the women in the room had moved across the country to join the company. The conversation quickly became livelier as many of them detailed their common experience of a perceived “fake niceness” that permeates Portland. They felt like the Pacific Northwest is “nice” while other regions of the country, especially the East Coast and South, are “kind.” In their experience, people in the PNW are nice on the surface—they’ll engage with you in a polite way, but when it comes to taking an interaction deeper they are MIA. One woman shared that she felt so many of her interactions here were transactional in nature. When she thought she was making a new friend, that person would disappear after they got whatever it is they needed from her.
She went on to say that on the East Coast, folks aren’t necessarily “nice” on the surface, i.e. they don't go out of their way to make small talk with you as they go about their business. But whenever a conversation does occur, it goes deeper and is more intentional. They actually want to connect, she said.
I felt my heart beating faster as I internally reacted to this portrayal of the PNW.
When there was a lull in the conversation, I jumped in to ask if they felt this way solely at work or also in their personal lives around Portland. They all shared that it was both.
I remarked that it saddened me to hear that so many people felt that way and that it was a “thing.” Having lived in Portland for 10 years and the PNW for the last 21 years (two-thirds of my life), this was a foreign concept to me.
In this season of my life, I find myself craving deeper connection and I’m still navigating making work friends 2.5 years into my job, but I’ve never felt this “fake niceness” they were talking about.
It reminded me of something similar I’d learned about years ago—the “Seattle freeze.”
Wikipedia defines it here as “a difficulty with making new friends in [Seattle], particularly for transplants from other areas.” It is an aversion to strangers classified with traits like “very polite but not particularly friendly” and “socioculturally apathetic, standoffish, cold, distant, and distrustful.”
When I first heard of this years ago, I immediately asked my brother, who still lives in Seattle today, if it was indeed a thing. A non-transplant Seattleite, he shared that he had experienced it in the dating world. My mouth dropped open with disbelief as he said that a majority of women he met on the apps immediately asked him what he did for work and what kind of car he drove, seemingly as a means to assess his wealth. While not directly the definition of the Seattle freeze, it clearly pointed to some kind of apathy for anyone whom you can't benefit from.
The term’s Wikipedia page goes on to state: “The phenomenon is sometimes found or associated with Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, Canada; or other cities in the Pacific Northwest as well.”
Oof. Up until this week I had thought Portland was immune from this trait but it appears that’s not the case.
Granted, there’s inherently some level of inaccuracy when generalizing an entire region of people by a singular trait, especially when that region is increasingly made up of said transplants.
But it’s hard to ignore that there has to be some truth about it for it to become a widespread term in the cultural zeitgeist (hell, it has its own Wikipedia page!).
As my colleagues carried on the conversation about their experiences being on the receiving end of the “Portland freeze,” internally I was assessing myself with a microscope. Had I ever done that to anyone? Was I one of the “nice but not kind” people they were talking about?
While technically a transplant who moved to Portland in my early adulthood, I had a privilege about me having the PNW in my blood and having gone to college in the state of Oregon. In fact, the early days of living here were spent with women I knew from college or friends of my then-boyfriend's since he had gone to high school in the area.
It seems by definition then, I was immune to the so-called freeze.
No one was putting me on the spot or questioning me personally, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit defensive.
I sincerely hope someone in my life would’ve told me if I’d acted in that way, but when I look deep inside myself I know in my heart that isn't me.
I pride myself on being genuine, authentic, and thoughtful in my interactions with people, whether at work, within my community, or in my personal life.
So it pained me to consider the alternate reality of a lot of people who’ve moved here. I felt an urge to shout out, “we’re not all like that!” As a defense for Portland and for myself, though which one took precedent I am not sure.
—
I was still pondering this a couple days later when I attended a community book swap event hosted by
from the newsletter.It was the first in-person meetup she hosted for her local readers here in Portland. Having never been to an IRL event for a community built around an online newsletter, I had no idea what to expect.
So I was pleasantly surprised at just how much fun it was. Both me and my friend I went with felt like the atmosphere forged easy, meaningful conversation. Gone was the typical small talk of a room full of strangers, in its place an instant connection over books and like topics. I was sad to leave at the end of the night, as I wanted to keep talking to all the cool, like-minded women I’d met there.
I have no idea how many of the 30 or so women in attendance were transplants or locals. Regardless, it certainly didn't feel like a room affected by the “freeze.”
—
This morning I got coffee with my neighbor. It was a first for the two of us. Over the past few years we’d occasionally run into each other in the parking lot or at quarterly HOA meetings, so we’d built enough of a rapport to know a bit about each other's lives, but it never permeated beyond that. I recently suggested to her that we get coffee sometime, in an effort to better know my literal neighbors.
As we chatted over our cardamom and golden milk lattes, she coincidentally asked me if I’d heard of the Seattle freeze.
I couldn’t believe that came up again just days later. I chuckled, sharing with her the conversation from my book club the other day. An Oregon native herself, she shared that she felt the same as me, somewhat immune to the freeze, yet also aspiring to have deeper connections.
How is it, then, that those of us who aren’t transplants also struggle to find the type of connection we crave?
Do we not know how to articulate what it is we’re looking for?
Is it a culprit of social media? The loneliness epidemic? Post-pandemic effects? A symptom of the SAD winter months?
Is it because of our cultural tendency to put more energy into our nuclear family than with others? Not treating friendships with the same importance we do our romantic relationships?
I’m sure it’s probably a mixture of all these things.
And I think, dear reader, it is the reason I continue to write this newsletter.
To connect with like-minded people, to bond over our shared life experiences and vulnerabilities.
To put words behind a lot of the thoughts that quite simply aren't fit for a brief conversation.
While at the book swap event I ran into an old college friend who I hadn’t spoken to in years. In her words, it was kismet. When I shared that I’d recently discovered her Substack and started following along, she remarked that it was weird putting her life on the internet, not knowing who’s reading it.
But perhaps we put our life on the internet for just that reason—to know who’s reading it. To put faces to names and make connections beyond those at our physical reach.
It was, after all, the entire origin of how the book swap event came to be. When Leslie greeted the group to officially kick off the evening’s festivities, she expressed her gratitude, remarking on how special it was to meet readers in person. It's a sentiment I often hear from other content creators - podcasters who put on live shows, authors who conduct book tours, etc.
If it weren’t the connection over our shared humanity, we wouldn't all be here, doing this work in the first place.
And there's something beautiful and hopeful about that. ✨
I want to hear from you! Have you experienced this “freeze” phenomenon, whether in the PNW or elsewhere around the world? How do you cultivate meaningful relationships?
Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual (Penguin, 2021), 218-219
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23102/portland/population
I’ve always said something along these lines about Bend. But I never quite understood it until I moved to NYC. People always think New Yorkers are rude bc they won’t engage in meaningless small talk. They’re busy! But, in a perfect example of your umbrella concept, I had a literal stranger give me his umbrella when it started to pour rain and I was caught without. While building a community anywhere as an adult is tough, I miss the conversations I had with New Yorkers and the deep connection you feel by simply existing together in a city like that. You’re part of a larger community that is New Yorkers. People are curious. They’re direct. They’re honest. When I moved to LA, while I encountered a lot more meaningless small talk at the grocery store or coffee shop, I noticed that people really didn’t care to go deep. LA is the ultimate example of fake, surface-level encounters. Being back in Bend after these places has been wild. I think I often am perceived as rude, which makes me sad, bc I’m often just being direct. But people here don’t know what to make of that. People here will also literally run you over with their cart in the grocery store lol. And the clicks are all too real, sadly. But I think anywhere you live, you can carve out a community of kind people. It just takes a lot of digging.
I've heard so many people talk about The Seattle Freeze, but have never felt it myself as a born-and-raised Seattleite and have certainly never thought I've contributed to it (at least not consciously!). Like you, it's always bummed me out to hear people say they've experienced it. I do think that PNWesterners tend to be more shy than folks in other parts of the country. I'm not sure if it's the weather or what lol. I also think many people who are born in the PNW tend to stay here, and that can cause people to stick to their established groups and support systems and not look for connection outside of them. It's not how I operate, but I can see how it might happen. Either way, I love that you are proving the stigma wrong and are choosing to make genuine connections! I also love hearing about all these synchronicities ✨