My wife and I became apartment dwellers eight years ago, and we were fortunate to move into a building where most of the people are friendly, greet you when you enter the elevator, and wish you well when you exit. We have become good friends with a number of the hundreds of people who live here. Occasionally, however, I may be riding the elevator with one or two other people who don’t make eye contact and don’t even acknowledge my wish for them to have a good rest of the day when one of us reaches our destination floor and exits the elevator. Being particularly courageous, I used to regularly curse at them under my breath after the elevator door closes. But as I began to do more self-evaluation, I’ve changed my thinking as well as my sub-vocal behavior.
Somewhere around the time that I reached middle-age, I started hearing the phrase, “Have a nice day!” as a substitute for goodbye – whether it was stated in person or over the phone. I’m certain that it wasn’t in the public lexicon when I was growing up, but once it became popular the phrase soon became so ubiquitous that people started getting annoyed by it. You could even purchase a button in novelty shops that preemptively said, “Don’t tell me what kind of a day to have.”
For many of us, however, we adopted some form of the phrase as a more personalized version of goodbye – adjusted for the time of day and personalized to wish our contacts a good rest of the day, nice evening, etc. Because it made so much sense to verbally reciprocate, I found it offensive when people ignored my good wishes for them. And then I started thinking.
There actually are a lot of reasons that a person might not respond: somebody’s background may not have sensitized to this form of politeness although they could otherwise be very nice; they may be preoccupied and not even heard it; they may have a history that includes bad experiences when getting involved in conversations initiated by strangers; they may be personally shy and reserved; and maybe they really aren’t having a nice day and not wanting to talk about it – coming from a funeral or a visit to a terminally ill friend or having received a layoff notice or suffered a big loss in the stock market.
The thing that my self-examination has led me to conclude is that if my desire for another person to have a good day is an honest and sincere reflection of my feelings, I don’t need validation from the other person. While it is nice to have reciprocity, and that actually happens most of the time, it is not necessary to make me feel like I’ve done the right thing. And doing the right thing can be internally rewarding without always getting positive feedback. If you find yourself in the position of doing the right thing but not getting positive feedback, remember there may be a reason for it that has nothing to do with you.
So, if you and I spend any time together, there’s a pretty good chance that when we part, I will express my wish that you have a nice day. You can treat my wish any way that you would like and be fully confident that I won’t curse you under my breath.