Stop Telling Us to Smile.

How many times have you been sitting somewhere, listening to music, reading a book, scrolling your phone, or just thinking to yourself, and then some arrogant stranger walked by and told you to smile?

You weren't smiling, true. But you weren't sad, lonely, depressed, or anything else. That jerk saw you and decided to barge into your life, presumed to correct you, and then presented it as an act of kindness.

Whatever mood you were in, they botched it.

Oh, the fragility.

Everyone keeps talking about this mental health crisis we're in. Everyone has a theory about why we're so off. If nothing else, there's plenty to sit and think about these days, including a hundred future selves lost to this unraveling world, and that's assuming you even feel safe enough in public to try it. A lot of us need more time to ourselves, because it takes a long time to digest and process the daily horror show unfolding before us.

We only get the slightest reprieves, usually of our own making.

Just the other day, I was having such a moment. I was staring through the window at a mountain, really letting it all sink in. I was glad there was nobody around to ruin that moment. I needed it.

These are the moments that enable us to truly be happy and construct something of a normal we can live with, including moments when we smile on our own terms. It's a private, inner normal that has nothing to do with movie theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, or sports centers.

It's an outlaw happiness.

The stewards of our economy frown on this kind of inner happiness, because it's not profitable. The fake yellow happiness that gets slapped on merchandise and peddled in commercials, that's what they want. That's the kind of happiness that ruins your reveries with this tedious insistence that we smile, largely for the sake of other people, despite this slow motion collapse.

They think the answer lies in more smiling and more fake social interactions. They're wrong. They don't get it, either. Americans have spent the last two hundred years reading books like The Secret and telling each other to smile. It's not working, is it? The more we do that, the worse it seems to make our mental health.

Here's a radical idea:

Maybe we're demonstrating an emotionally healthy response to everything going on in the world, and this "mental health crisis" presents yet another piece of gaslighting propaganda to convince us we're the ones who need help, not the billionaires and their friends rendering the planet uninhabitable while driving up wealth inequality and destroying our democracies. Maybe most of us would be just fine if there weren't always someone demanding something from us, whether it's our money, our time, our support, our vote, or our loyalty. We only have so much of that to give, only so many smiles.

Smiles like the ones we're expected to give aren't free. Often, they're a form of labor, meant for someone else.

We're tired of it.