Why I smile at strangers (and why you should too)

Whenever I go for a walk, I make a point of acknowledging the people going by and giving them a smile. It's a simple gesture, and it costs nothing.

A while back I passed a woman out on a run. She had the look most runners have mid-effort: headphones in, eyes forward, completely tuned out. I smiled as we crossed paths. She noticed, and her whole face changed. Ear to ear. She even threw me a wave as she kept going.

That was it. That was the entire interaction. Two seconds, no words, and both of us walked away better than we showed up.

Where I picked this up

I stole this habit from a graduate professor of mine, Dr. Miller.

Every time you saw Dr. Miller, around campus or in his office hours, he lit up. In that moment you felt like you were the person he most wanted to see. And it wasn't situational. It happened every single time.

It changed how I felt walking into his office, and it changed what I thought of him. The logic is simple: when you're around people who make you feel good, you want to be around them more. Going to talk to Dr. Miller was never a chore. It was a pleasure.

At some point I realized how little that actually cost him, and I started trying to do it myself. No matter how I was feeling, when I saw someone I knew, I'd try to emulate Dr. Miller. Friendly smile, quick hello.

Eventually I stopped limiting it to people I knew.

Why such a small thing lands so hard

Go out and actually pay attention to people's faces on a sidewalk. Almost everyone is somewhere else. Headphones in, phone up, mentally halfway through tomorrow's to-do list. The default expression isn't unfriendly, it's just absent.

So when someone breaks that pattern, it registers. A smile from a stranger is one of the only interactions left that comes with nothing attached to it. Nobody's selling you anything. Nobody wants your time or your email address. It's just a person acknowledging that you exist and that they're glad about it, and then they're gone.

That's rarer than it should be, which is exactly why it hits.

You never know what someone is carrying

I've had my share of ups and downs, so I know how heavy life can get. And you almost never really know what the person coming toward you is dealing with that day.

That's the whole argument. You can't know, so you may as well assume it might matter. When you're the one feeling low, another human being flashing you a smile (even for a second) can lift your head up. It doesn't fix anything. It just breaks the fog for a moment, and some days that's plenty.

It also means you don't get to keep score. Plenty of people won't notice, and some won't smile back. It costs you nothing either way. The second you start expecting a return, you've turned a free gesture into a transaction.

What it does for you

Here's the part I didn't expect: it's very hard to stay in a bad mood while doing this.

You can't smile at forty people over a two-mile walk and stay locked inside your own head. You start actually seeing people. The guy fighting his dog's leash, the couple pushing a stroller, the woman running her intervals. Your walk stops being a loop you're grinding through and turns into a place with other humans in it.

It isn't really about walking

Walks are just where I noticed it, and where it's easiest to do. You aren't busy, nobody needs anything from you, and there's a steady stream of people coming the other way.

But none of it is specific to a sidewalk. The same two seconds work in a checkout line, an elevator, a waiting room, a hallway at the office. Dr. Miller wasn't out on a walk when he did it. He was sitting in his office in the middle of his own workday, with a stack of things he needed to get to, and he still looked up like you were the best part of it.

He almost certainly has no idea he taught me any of this. That's sort of the point. You don't get told when it lands.

So take it on your next walk, and then take it everywhere else. Look up, and smile at whoever is in front of you.