thatsme

"The world, they say, is a nice place. Especially if you are not. Or so it seems."

These people are always at the best of their behavior, good at academics and no really bad at social etiquette, they were your quintessential nice guys. Call it good parenting/teaching or lack of opportunities to be bad, they always believe that it was everyone's responsibility to keep the world a nice place, and that they need to be nice, before expecting niceness from others.

In theory, this should have worked, but the reality seemed far from it. These people feel like the guy who continues a group-prank, when everyone opts out of it, at the last minute. I think there was a caveat for the idea of making the world a nicer place, that it only works when everyone becomes nice, at the same instant. Apparently, they have missed that caveat.

It starts very early. People always expect more from people who make an effort to be nice. The expectations are almost exponential, especially if you are nice.
Comments like ,
"I can understand if X does something wrong. But from You ?? (with a capital Y)"
"Even You??"
"Trees which bear fruits, will have to suffer the pain of stoning"
and "You can observe the dark spots only on a full moon", are almost a regularity.

It may be an unreasonable expectation , probably because you are a nice guy, to expect that the world to be fair enough to provide a level platform to all the people. But fairness in this world, is almost as rare as intelligent life in the never ending cosmos.

If you fall into this category, in school, if you ever fall below the so-called high expectations, purportedly set by yourself, you will be flogged with comments and expressions, that would make you feel that you have committed a blasphemous crime of the worst kind. All this happens while your less-nice compatriots play along in gay abandon, with no questions asked, apart from the occasional comparisons  with the nicer guys.

In adolescence, while everyone else is trying to find their sexuality, these poor souls will be busy fighting the urges of their first crush, but commissioning their focus onto something less carnal (Video Games, Academics, Cricket etc), for it is something no less than a crime, again by their own standards(or so were they made to believe). Even if they ever break their shackles and try to strike a conversation with their crushes, chances are that they find themselves in a bottomless pit, now-a-days being called as friend-zone. While these people evolve into nerds and geeks, the others will happily walk away into the sunset, holding hands.

Once you enter the corporate world, the scene does not change much. It appears natural for the rest of the world,that these "nice" people have no option, but to compensate for the all the bad in the world. This notion is also bearable, if the distribution is uniform. In reality, this is not the case.
Right from the pre-historic days of "Mahabharata", when the good: bad ratio was literally 5%, it was always lopsided towards bad. The game is heavily rigged, towards the not so nice people.
At the time of appraisals and assessments, you will be dragged down by your own accomplishments, so much that your seemingly amazing achievements, become, "its-expected-at-your-level" things.

In the political scene too, these people have to prove a lot more than their regular counter-parts. If they have formed a  political party with an agenda like anti-corruption or social justice, people will scrutinize them all the more, to find faults. While there is absolutely nothing wrong in the scrutiny, what is baffling is the askew-ness of this scrutiny. People seem to always come to terms with the inadequacies of the "not-so-nice" , for the lack of a better word. At the same time, they do not seem to have enough time to forgive even an iota of a mistake committed by the "nice", just because they have set high standards for themselves.

The worst part is that this process seems to drive more and more people away from being good and there by augmenting the divide between the good and the bad, ironically, making the nice people look like misfits in a world that just seems to swing away heavily against them.

In spite of all this, there seems to be some very inexplicable tenacity and consummate resilience about these people, to still stick to the standards that were imposed by the conditioning of the world. Probably, these people are the real "Atlas"es bearing the weight of the world.