This is How The World Ends. Not with a Bang, but a Smile.

About a year ago, a company in Japan started offering courses in smiling. You could spend hours a day in a big gymnasium listening to lectures on smiling, practicing your smile, and then taking a test for an app that rated your smile. If you scored below an 80, you failed and had to take the course again.

Doesn’t that sound exciting?

The smiling course tips the iceberg on a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to helping everyone look like they’re happy when they’re not, usually in order to build wealth and influence. Practicing your smile has become a ubiquitous feature of self-help, for a variety of reasons. It sends a simple, revealing message about our culture. We live in a world where we have to learn how to smile. As a neurodivergent who’s been told many times my real smile “needs work,” I dissent.

I will not learn how to smile.

All of this reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” a work of literature written in 1925, written almost exactly 100 years ago.

What a co-ink-i-dink.

When I first read “The Hollow Men” in Brit Lit as a college student, I’ve got to be honest. It didn’t resonate. Today?

Boy does it resonate.

It was “The Hollow Men” that gave us that echoing line: “This is how the world ends… not with a bang but a whimper.”

When you appreciate the fact that T.S. Eliot was writing about the impotence of a society obsessing over normalcy in the wake of pandemics and global warfare, the poem comes alive. It’s worth ten courses on smiling. Many of us understand what Eliot meant now, on a gut level.

Odds are, you’ve been told to smile your entire life. It started with your family. Then your friends started doing it. Then total strangers got in on the action. Now here we are in the 2020s, with everything falling apart, and idiots are still telling us to smile while life coaches insist we should even force ourselves to do it because it’ll cure our anxiety and depression. Here’s the thing:

They’re all wrong.

As the vibes police point out all the time, we seem to be suffering something of a mental health crisis in the western world. The internet offers up endless excuses like phones and social media, or not hanging out more, but we rarely talk about the toxic habits that cause the real problem.

For example:

Forcing yourself to smile isn’t good for you. Smiling for other people is especially not good for you. And yet, we’re often pressured to do it at home and forced to do it at work, no matter how much damage it does. It’s worth talking about now, as we enter a season filled with expectations to smile no matter how tired, stressed, overworked, angry, or alone we feel. Psychologists have a name for the kind of smiling our culture encourages, and it’s deeply unhealthy.

Let’s review the research.