Thank You (Photo credit: mandiberg)
All of our lives, we are told to be polite. Drilled into our heads as children that we need to be courteous and polite to others. Parents use the famous saying of “Don’t forget to say “PLEASE” and “THANK YOU.” These are values that are ingrained in us and that we carry into adulthood. Yet along the way, some people forget the basics – they no longer think they need to say please and thank you to others. It becomes a distant memory in their minds. They’ve carved out new values and those teachings about being polite fly right out the window.
There are a lot of these people. I encounter them on a daily basis. It’s amazing really the amount of people…and that is why I started to think about this topic. I explored the reasoning behind why I need to be polite. Sure my parents told me to be but why I’m I still polite. I’m an adult. I make my own decisions, I pay bills, I work, and yet I’m always polite.
That is why this post is a departure for me and I’m venturing into new territory – to a place where I advocate reason why you don’t need to be polite.
1. It gets annoying when you never get a thank you or thanks back for doing something polite
2. People stare at you strangely when you say please and thank you
3. Its exhausting being so polite
I don’t know how many times I’ve done something nice and polite – open the door for someone; get out of my seat for someone on the bus; let a car in front of me on a jammed-packed road full of traffic…I could go on and on with these examples and I would say about 5% of the time (that is 5% out of 100%) someone will say thank you.
People do stare at you strangely when you say please and thank you. It seems likes its a crazy foreign language that they have never heard before. I get this a lot.
Always saying thank you and please is definitely exhausting. There are a lot of reasons where you need to say it and it just gets to be so tough to keep it up.
All in all, I’m still going to be polite (that is how my parents raised me) and something I believe makes me who I am but sometimes I really like the best three reasons why not to be polite for a change.
best 3 of everything 