smile !!!

19 May, 2026

Loving the smile discourse going on, original post by Living Kindfully.

I feel compelled to write something about this because I smile a lot in person. I also live in the Philippines.

Smiling a lot, even by Filipino standards, is something people around me has noticed ever since I was a teenager and through adulthood. One thing about me is that I will smile and laugh and giggle all the time, so how often strangers will smile at you here will depend on where you are, what you're currently doing, and your culture.

The rest of the world already know us for our hospitality and Westerners have pointed this out already all the time. We even have a city that is called the City of Smiles. And we have the beaches, the beautiful islands and the people on the street who will always be willing to help you with a smile (mp3).

I'd say the tourism and kindness in general is what we are known for across the globe. I think it is a natural side effect when our alleged most valuable export is our people labor.

Though outside the perspective of foreigners and the virtue of kindness, we are also highly resilient. Typhoons hit our lands every year and someone smiling while wading floodwaters will make the front page. A senate coup just happened last week and rest assured we are making memes about it. I am from a very unserious country, which is why I also think we are pretty funny, so the smiles come so naturally. But of course it doesn't mean we are not miserable and these are still general views, written by someone who is extroverted, optimistic and also very unserious.

In seriousness, I'd like to equate losing the ability to smile to misery. Everywhere in the world, the tendency for misery to take over your life is at its height when your childhood ends and adulthood begins.

Say you move out after college. No longer are the support your parents gave you all your life, you acquire a job and you start to have responsibilities (WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD, someone will probably say this to you) - laundry, your meals, your bills, your own doctor appointments and what furniture to buy. In these activities, the lifecycle of your labor, money and time is fully realized. It's not so much of a pretty picture when it dawns on you at some point that you are just another cog in the machine.

You hear news of war, of politicians running away with your hard-earned money and of calamities, the influence of these events trickling down on its way to you when you do a double-take in your grocery receipt and the memes and commentaries that are in short-form videos you consume in your daily commute to work.

There is honestly no trick on how to get over the fact that we are at late stage capitalism, no grand advice that is going to reverse the unfortunate and unfair events that we are currently experiencing.

This is bleak. The future is bleak. There is no Easy way out and no nice way of putting it.

But misery is still a tendency and a state of mind. It can be resisted. We must find the balance of accepting the truth of our problems, processing it in our own ways and still being kind. Not to be confused with being positive, just being kind¹.

Kindness is a choice.²

You can take a page out of our book of resiliency and unseriousness. Find amusement in everything or something to be grateful for or the reason why you got up today. Just so when a stranger smiles at you at the grocery store, you can hold on to a little bit of hope that it is not a threat and nothing bad is going to happen to you :)

#2026 #adulthood #life