Try a new game: Make others smile — and let yourself smile with them

By David McElroy · August 2, 2018

I’m not sure exactly when this game started. I don’t even remember when I first noticed what I was doing. I just know it frequently lifts my spirits when I need a boost.

It sounds silly. It sounds like something a child might do. But it makes me happy — and I’ve realized it lets me bring a brief bit of joy to others along my way every day. And it’s super simple.

The game? I count how many times each day that I can get people to smile — when they clearly hadn’t felt like smiling beforehand.

Ridiculous? Maybe. Childlike? Absolutely. Life-changing? Maybe.

Dr. Jerome Motto was involved with attempts to curb suicide in the San Francisco Bay Area for years. One of his patients committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1963, but the retired physician told the New Yorker in 2003 that the suicide which affected him the most occurred in the 1970s. After a man jumped to his death, Motto learned something that left him chilled.

“I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he said. “The guy was in his 30s, lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”

Apparently, nobody smiled at him. He jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and died.

What if you could have been the person who smiled at him? What if you could have made him smile? Might you have saved his life?

We never know the drama that’s going on inside the heads of the people around us. We never know who’s miserable and needs a reason to smile, even if it’s just for a moment.

Today, I got three smiles from people who didn’t seem inclined to smile before I said something to them. Just three people. It took me only a few seconds of effort. But all three seemed briefly happy — and each experience gave me a brief feeling of euphoria

In Walmart this evening, I stopped to chat with the door greeter. She was having a terrible day and she told me how unhappy she was with a couple of things. I briefly commiserated with her and then I told her — almost as an afterthought — that she looks really great tonight wearing some red earrings that matched a bright red shirt underneath her Walmart vest.

She immediately brightened and a big smile came over her face.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really needed that.”

She hugged me and I went on my way, but she was still grinning.

There are a million ways to make people smile. Sometimes it’s a compliment — if it’s truly genuine, of course. Other times, it’s sincerely listening to what they have to say. At other times it can be a silly joke. After awhile, it becomes a game.

I made a 3-year-old girl smile in Chick-fil-A tonight. She certainly wasn’t a suicide risk, but you might have thought her life was over as her mother led her to the restroom at one point. She was limping and her exasperated mom tried to get her to move along.

When they came out of the restroom, I smiled at the mother and she said, “She’s decided she can’t tee-tee because she has a broken leg.” And they went back to their table near the play area, but the little girl was still unhappy.

I was leaving a couple of minutes later, so I stopped at their table and asked the little girl if her broken leg had healed. She grinned a huge smile and started showing me where her leg had been “broken” a few minutes before. I told her she must heal really quickly and congratulated her on being better. Her mother seemed to appreciate someone taking the little girl seriously and she grinned at our exchange.

There was another woman in a different store, but you get the idea. In each case, the exchange took only a few seconds, but it made someone else happy — and it made me feel happier, too.

Try my game. I suspect you’ll enjoy it.

How many grumpy people can you get smiles from? You won’t always be successful. Some people seem to enjoy their misery so much — or else they’re just so deep in pain — that they won’t play along. But that’s OK. Just count how many times you get the unexpected smile. You might be surprised.

Sunsets make me happy. They make me smile. The more dramatic ones frequently cause others to smile, too. So here’s my blatant attempt to make you smile. Will it work?

I shot the picture above about five minutes after sunset tonight in Birmingham. It was gorgeous to experience and it has been a joy to share. Take a close look at it. See if the beauty I experienced will make you smile, too.

I sized a copy of this sunset picture for use as a desktop picture on a computer, so if you’d like to grab a copy of this — if it will make you smile — click here to download a 2560×1600-pixel version. It’s sized for the native resolution of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it should be able to resize for most screens.

And here’s Merlin guarding the windows of my office Thursday morning. My cats and my dog make me smile — and it makes me happy to share them with others. (They have their own Instagram account if you’d like to see more.)

There are plenty of reasons to smile. Beauty. Humor. Love. Good will. Gratitude. You can find plenty of reasons if you look for them.

Making others smile might not change your life. You might not even save anybody else’s life. But if you’ll make a few people smile today, you’ll make them just a little bit happier — and you might find it changing you just a little bit every day.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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