The Tyranny of the Forced Smile
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm a bit on the fence about it. Central Europeans, including Czechs are a rather gloomy bunch :-) especially in the winter. Americans are definitely more cheerful, and it is not fake. Ok, sometimes it is but generally speaking Americans are in fact more cheerful and optimistic. Ok, Czechs have five centuries of being conquered and subjugated of course, so let's not draw too many conclusions.
In terms of smiling strangers, well, I'd like a bit more of it than we have here in the Czech Republic (where there is very little)
But yes, us Slavs are a gloomy bunch. But only on the outside and only to strangers. Particularly Americans. Whenever I'm in the States I commonly get accused of being emotionless and of having a deadpan face. At the same time, I feel everybody I meet there is a clown and I always make sure to tune down their enthusiasm. If an American says something is super awesome and the best thing ever, it's probably kinda okayish.
Anyway, the interesting thing I've found comparing Slavs to Americans is that while Slavs are weary of strangers, they open up much sooner. You can be friends with Americans for months and years, but if you haven't gone to the same kindergarten together, you will never be a true friend. Whereas with Slavs, you could have met at a bar three hours ago, and already you're confessing your deepest darkest secrets to each other and are practically best friends.
Source: having lived in the States for some time
PS: to be fair, most Europeans I've met both in Europe and in the US share this immediately friends trait. So far none of the Americans I've met have, possibly because of The Big City effect.
i'm american, and i can make instant friends with americans. i did it throughout my 20s when traveling here in the US and overseas. in fact i've done it all over 4 continents now. this doesn't seem to be a racial or cultural trait. some people are friendly, some aren't.
perhaps the fact that you describe yourself as 'gloomy' is the reason americans do not find it easy to befriend you even after a few drinks.
Funnily, Europeans have started labeling me as too cheery, smiley, and direct. Too American.
And yes, it could well be the sense of common cultural heritage at play here. But Europeans in general don't have as much of a common heritage as Americans do, and we all grew up on American culture anyway. Particularly for everyone growing up in the 90's when American stuff was extremely popular here as we were trying to be less like The Old System (tm) and embrace The Capitalism (tm).
Although there are a lot of differences in observing a culture and actually living it. I'll grant you that.
At the end of the day, this is anecdata. Your mileage may vary.
I have a friend who consciously does not want to talk about taboo topics because then she could find out her friends are assholes...
New Orleans residents are outliers. They are far and away the friendliest people I've met anywhere in the US, but at the same time it's a tourist economy and everyone seems to have a hustle. Much love for New Orleans.
Let's make some more generalizations.
I found this bit interesting: "Admittedly, the dynamism of Western capitalism depends upon people who work with missionary zeal, who refuse to accept that a job is merely a job. It must be something more — a vocation, an adventure, a journey to higher heights."
He has something there. Easiest way to make people your slaves (this is a metaphor, in case it's not obvious) it's to convince them that pushing papers in some dreary cubicle for peanuts is somehow a mission, a source of pride.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
But whenever you see a group of Czechs doing something, we are all laughs and smiles. Friends, colleagues, coworkers ... even at work, we spend a lot of time telling stupid jokes, laughing and goofing around.
There's no forced smile, no, but there's a lot of fun.
A few years ago I thought I would try something different. I decided that no matter how I felt each day, I was going to smile and be as friendly as possible to everybody I met. At times, walking through the hallways of the new job, I felt like an idiot. But I didn't care. I just smiled and tried to be friendly.
I know that many times I probably smiled and said hello to the same people twice -- as if I had never seen them that day. I know that at times I must have appeared simple-minded. It was a horrible feeling that first week.
Then something strange happened. People started smiling back. I would be working off to the side of a large room, and folks would come over and say hello. People -- I had no idea what their names were or what their jobs were -- would ask me how I was doing.
So I kept the experiment going. After a month, I had some really bad personal news and I know I came in to work very downtrodden. At this point, all of that "fake happiness" I had put in the bank came back to me. The anonymous people I had smiled at? They now made an effort to cheer me up. No effort was required on my part. If I came in upset, within a couple of hours of having other people smile at me, I felt like smiling back at everybody else.
This went on for a few months. It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had, and when I left, about a dozen people came over and told me that I had done a great job and they would miss me. (I just did my normal job)
Lesson? Smiles are very, very powerful social tools, even if they are forced. They cheer other people up, they cheer you up, and over time they provide some kind of weird social insurance that you can tap into when you're having a bad day. What blew my mind was that the fake part wasn't even important. Simply by trying you got all of the benefits.
There are limits to duty, but there are no limits to passion, that's why your employer wants you to be passionate about him. Especially in startuplandia. Hint, grasshopper, he is not passionate about you, he views you as a resource to be strip-mined. The personnel department is appropiately called "Human Resources" these days.
It's just this - why do employees internalize the "passion meme" without any trace of cynicism, and why do customers condone the state of affairs?
But yet, people do it. They know they are getting screwed over, they know they are often destroying their bodies, but they keep on doing it. Because people who want to cook are truly passionate about it. Cooking for someone is an incredible intimate and loving act; one that no amount of corporatism or job function abstraction can dispel.
It is an act in which the symbolism and the functionalism are inseparable. When you are serving food, you are literally nourishing people. You are literally providing the substance they need to survive. You are literally crafting, with your own hands, the matter that will become a literal part of another human being.
Such a primal act naturally stirs a lot of passion, but likewise, as you say, great opportunities for abuse. Most kitchen employees don't make terribly much more than minimum wage. In expensive cities like San Francisco or New York, it's almost impossible to make a living wage. Even in high-end restaurants.
I'm puzzled over the statement that this is supposedly hard to translate. Both translations offered miss the important distinction of tying the soldiers pay to their willingness to go above and beyond. Let me make an attempt:
> "That's quite enough for six dimes, today, Fritz."
That being said: I'm not sure it's smart to insist on binding your passion only to the money you make from its product. For things like being a soldier, that may be more true than other professions, but there are very few challenges that can only ever be compensated monetarily.
I know it's a common exploitation trope to tell people to not think about the money too much and instead appreciate the experience. However, a lot of people are so focused on never being even slightly exploited in that way that they do miss out on all the potential experiences - sometimes precisely the kind of experiences that would put them in a position where they could be on the better end of that equation.
At its core, this is really about human social response and compelled social behavior. The article could be about "bitchy resting face" or tipping, or any other form of compelled social niceity and it could delve into the same topics.
People see certain social cues, and they interpret them based on past experience. People who smile at you, and talk in a certain frequency range, and use certain words, must be nice and want to help you. Anyone who owns a business wants all customers to feel that emotion whenever they associate with your business, and implicit social contracts evolve that basically codify that.
It's like "The Game" in some respects. There are certain social cues / responses that most people have internalized so deeply that they're barely aware they respond to them. Most people interpret offhand compliments from a person with apparent detatched interest as intriguing. They interpret questions about them as interest. Easy smiles as confidence. Ect...
With the aforementioned tipping, it's a similar mechanism that reinforces certain behavior in wait staff. In a sense, it's a way that those with money can compel behavior from those that don't. An aspect of the symbolic power that wealth effectively represents.
Anyhow, lunch arrived, so I'm done, and I'll have to make that very choice in a few moments.
"Admittedly, the dynamism of Western capitalism depends upon people who work with missionary zeal, who refuse to accept that a job is merely a job."
Is it the "the dynamism of Western capitalism" that causes people to pretend to like their job, or is it the scarcity of good jobs, which forces workers to engage in an exaggerated pantomime of missionary zeal?
Where in your choices are the people who love their work?
I wonder if it's true that the unemployment rate is coming down to reasonable levels. As I understand it, the unemployment rate that is typically reported excludes people that have given up looking for work.
I don't know if this is correct, but let's say that you had an economy where there were no jobs available. Precisely none. Over the long term, the unemployment rate would have to drift down to almost zero, as more and more people realized that there were no jobs available and gave up looking for work.
As regards the sentence you ask about, I think I am one of the people that does not look at his work as merely a job. Perhaps it's because I do try to distinguish between my work, my craft, my trade, from the other aspects of who happens to be paying my invoices.
Thoughts?
However, the BLS also publishes a rate that includes discouraged workers (U4), as well as a rate that includes "marginally attached workers" who would like to work, but for whatever reason have not looked for work recently (U5). All 3 of these have returned to normal levels [1].
There's also the U6 rate, which includes workers who are part-time, but would like to work full-time. [2]
There are 20 short clips of people smiling. Can you spot which ones are fake and which ones are genuine? (The test takes about 10 mins)
The key to faking a real smile is in wrinkling the eyes.
The wrinkling is not a very reliable indicator of fake smiles [1]. A real smile does indeed involve muscles around the eyes, but wrinkling could be caused by the cheek muscles pushing upward too.
Some more indicators of a real smile are, IIRC - curling corners of the mouth - corners of the eye pushing inward - short duration - it starts and ends smoothly - symmetry
[1] Source: Having recently read "Telling Lies" by Paul Ekman (and that was a HN recommendation too)
Happiness leads to smiling and smiling leads to happiness.
I door find "Tell us why you're passionate about Supply Chain Management" a curious question (my profession).
"I'm not, I'm interested in it and good at it" is insufficient. Of course, it is one of those interview situation questions to be ready for. Passion comes in many forms.
Some of the most competent people I know come across as grumpy and aloof. They get respect because they know their stuff and care about their work, and that shines through.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/10/10/unhappy-em...
http://www.ryot.org/gallup-poll-70-americans-disengaged-jobs...
Notably, Syria is at the bottom of the list with 0% of their worker being "actively engaged" in their jobs.
Here's a bit of the blurb from Amazon:
"In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or "emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart.
But what occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Russell Hochschild closely examines two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant’s job is to deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and be "nicer than natural." The bill collector’s job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes, roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and techniques of emotion management that serve the company’s commercial purpose."
Do I love my job? Sure. And I'd love any job analogous with it as well.... But I can't say that I've loved or even vaguely enjoyed all the jobs I've had, to do so would have made me a schmuck.
On the other hand, I am not impressed by "unequivocal statement". For seniors positions, I don't ask questions with a fixed answer. I prefer to listen to the candidates's opinions, to analyze the pros and cons of an approach, etc. I consider it low intelligence by any "unequivocal statement" for these questions.
1. I want to find people who are genuinely passionate about what they do.
2. If people are truly unhappy not being o.k with that, and not faking it may bring attention to a problem they or society faces. This may help highlight, and could lead to solutions. Do not go silent.
In addition, he comes to this from only an American experience. This is not a symptom you only see in the US. It's saccharine in many places. That said, saccharine or not, it does have a purpose as much as any other line of questioning. In other words, passion, love, whatever, while they may or may not be an indicator of how well someone will execute their job --the main purpose of such questions, in my mind, is to see how well prepared you are for something you can expect.
In other words, it's not that they expect a sincere answer or they are trying to torture you and see how you wiggle yourself out, but it's rather to gauge how adept you are at preparation. You know the questions is coming, yet, did you take the preparation to come up with a sensible answer. That is the function of the question.
On the other hand, if we were to take these questions literally, yes, then they are quite silly expectations. I have had them at just about every professional job and they are absurd. But we know it's all part of meta-communication. Do I wish it were simpler and didn't recourse to this style of communication, yes, but I think I understand its function.
On the other hand, I do enjoy people regarding their job as an act. A role to fulfill. When we understand our jobs to be essentially a role to fulfill, it's liberating in a way. It's no longer you, it's your job personae. Compare service workers in Japan and Europe. Which ones deal with their situation better? I believe the Japanese worker has a better understanding of the situation. They put on their persona and take it from there. To see it any other way is to see an actor performing a dark character and feeling bad for the actor. No, to the actor it makes no difference. It's an act.
That said, I've come across very good service workers in Europe as well. They very well understood their function and were happy to play it out.
Although the article might feel like it could have been written by a woman, its author Paul Jaskunas is a man.
Maybe it's as simple as the opening sentence, "I'm a Libra", which has a grammatically feminine noun. I wonder if the feeling depends on the native language of the reader.
As an aside, I think writers should try to stick to their core competencies. This looks like someone trying to write an article around an observation and came up with nebulous reasoning, hoping it would be a fun read for everyone and that people would chalk it up as a social commentary and move on, use it as conversational fodder. (ie. "I read in the NYTimes such and such, ha ha, don't you think it's funny...)
Unfortunately, lots of these writers lack rigor and seem to go with their gut on things. It's the easy way out. It's surely easier to meet deadlines that way, but the product leaves a bit to be desired.
The smile is more subtle in the workplace -- just a cheerful disposition -- but it's still there. And it helps that I am in fact a generally cheerful person.
As for knowing how to show an appropriate level of passion, I would expect this of a senior level person as well, because they will be interacting with colleagues, customers, etc.
Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3634#comic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_types_in_Japanese_culture