Important vs. nice and the existence of God vs. the dentist.

Recently I came across the saying: “It is nice to be important, but is more important to be nice”. I immediately liked that idea. As I am not very important, but like to think of myself as fairly nice, it felt good to think that that would be more important.

But then, of course I started to think about it, and then everything, of course, got more complicated. To whom is it more important to be nice? To others? Or to oneself? Ok, it might make you feel good about yourself to be nice, and it might give you a lot of friends. But on the other hand, if you are important, you will get friends anyway, because of course everyone wants to be befriended to someone who is important. And if you are important, you will always get a good job, make a lot of money, have a lot of extras and have access to all the cool places, which will most likely make you feel good about yourself. Nice people don’t really get very far by just being nice! People who are not nice will be able to step over dead bodies to get what they want, they will use other people for their own benefit and they will not care about other people’s feelings and wellbeing. That will get them what they want. Ok, you might say, but it won’t get them real friends. That might be right, but I guess these people probably don’t care and if they are important they will anyhow have people around them who will want to be their friends. And what about how they feel about themselves? I honestly really don’t think they care. So what is really most important?

These thoughts were so depressing that I wanted to believe in some kind of divine justice, that in the long run all the nice people will be rewarded. But as Keynes said; in the long run we are all dead. So this would then presume an existence of some kind of afterlife and some kind of divinity and I guess this is why people get religious; to be able to stand thoughts like these.

Hmmm, this made things even more complicated for me, as I just have decided that dentists are another proof that God does not exist. If there was an almighty God, teeth would have been perfect and we would not have had to go to the dentist…