Smile: A Ballad of Resilience in a Time of Ruin

"Smile, though your heart is aching,
Smile, even though it's breaking..."

Charlie Chaplin first composed the haunting melody of Smile for his 1936 film Modern Times, a satire about human suffering at the hands of industrialisation, greed, and faceless bureaucracy. The lyrics, added two decades later by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, have since become a balm of bittersweet resilience—whispering to the soul that even in despair, hope can flicker in the form of a smile.

Yet here we are in 2025, nearly a century after Chaplin’s mechanical tramp wandered through an unforgiving world, and the song—soft, tragic, and hopeful all at once—echoes with chilling resonance. The machinery has changed. The tramp has become an algorithm. The factories have given way to datacentres and drones. But the ache? The heartbreak? Still here. Still raw. Still breaking us.

And somehow… we’re still told to smile.

Let’s take that seriously.

The Smile as Symbol

Chaplin’s smile was not a celebration of denial. It was a rebellion. A mask of survival. A silent scream. In Modern Times, the smile often veils confusion, frustration, and anguish—but it also defies surrender. It is, in essence, a fragile human signal that we are still here. Not unbroken, but unbowed.

In a geopolitical climate now thick with conflict, propaganda, misinformation, and the icy flirtation with autocracy, Chaplin’s smile is no longer nostalgic. It’s prophetic.

We live in times where statesmen grin while economies burn. Where AI-generated avatars deliver corporate apologies for atrocities no one intends to fix. Where kindness looks outdated, nuance is suspicious, and silence can be seen as complicity or cowardice, depending on your chosen feed.

So what does it mean—today, seriously—to “smile though your heart is aching”?

It means reckoning with this: the human spirit is being asked to endure more than just inflation or climate anxiety or digital fatigue. We’re enduring dehumanisation, dressed up in the drag of technological advancement, market efficiency, and geopolitical realpolitik.

Modern Times, Again—Only Worse

Chaplin’s Modern Times was born in the shadow of the Great Depression and on the precipice of fascism in Europe. Sound familiar? In 1936, populism was rising, democracies were faltering, and workers were being chewed up by a capitalist machine that prized profit over people.

It’s hard not to draw parallels.

2025 has become a year of “Modern Times 2.0”—except the conveyor belts have become algorithms. We are still being dragged along, head first, by forces we barely understand: war in Eastern Europe grinds on, civil conflict spreads through Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere with heartbreaking regularity, and global democracy is receding—quietly, stealthily, under the camouflage of “national interest.”

And meanwhile, there is always the smile.

Smiling leaders. Smiling billionaires. Smiling influencers on your feed. Even AI-generated chatbots trained to be relentlessly upbeat—smiling with pixels and programmed optimism, promising they’re “here to help.”

Smile.

Because no one really wants to hear about despair.

Smile.

Because real human emotion, in the marketplace of attention, is often inconvenient.

Smile.

Because saying the truth might just be too costly, too confrontational, too... human.

The Smile as Subversion

But let’s not be too cynical. The smile isn’t just a corporate tactic or a sociopolitical anesthetic. It’s also a profoundly personal and human defiance.

In the trenches of Ukraine, soldiers smile for photos—not because they feel safe or happy, but because the smile says: we’re still alive. In Gaza, children play amidst rubble. Their smiles pierce the very heart of horror, not to deny the devastation, but to defy its ability to fully consume them.

In Tehran, women protest for basic rights with faces uncovered, not always shouting, sometimes smiling—challenging the regime not with rage, but with undiluted dignity.

This is where Chaplin’s smile belongs. Not in the mouths of marketing departments or diplomatic summits, but in the everyday acts of human endurance. In the refusal to be erased. In the stubborn insistence that joy, absurdity, love—even in the most broken of places—still has a right to exist.

The Smile That Hides the Bruise

Let us not romanticise it too much, though. The smile also conceals. It can be used to pacify, distract, and deny. There is such a thing as the performative smile—the kind we wear when we don’t know how to tell someone we’re drowning.

And sometimes we are drowning.

In political systems that promise change but deliver stagnation. In media that amplifies division and monetises our outrage. In governments that smile at the camera while dismantling transparency and civil liberties offstage.

We must learn to read the smile—not just emit it.

What is the smile hiding? What is it surviving? What is it saying, in its silence?

If Chaplin taught us anything, it’s that comedy, like smiling, often masks tragedy. And that the quietest people—the ones who say the least—may, in fact, be sounding the deepest alarms.

When Empathy Becomes Radical

To smile with someone, however, is a radically different gesture than smiling at them or smiling despite them.

To smile with someone means presence.

To smile with someone means recognising their pain and honouring it by offering not pity, but solidarity.

As global crises mount and societies polarise, smiling with becomes more important than ever. We must be careful not to demand smiles from those who suffer. We must stop telling the world’s oppressed to “cheer up” while we sip our lattes and scroll past bombed hospitals and refugee boats.

Chaplin’s own life was a testament to this. Though he became immensely famous, he never forgot his poverty-stricken childhood. He never lost his sharp eye for injustice, and was eventually exiled from the US during the McCarthy era—not because he was a communist, but because he dared to speak out.

He smiled, yes. But his was a smile that confronted, not escaped.

The Geopolitics of Smiling in 2025

So let’s be blunt.

The world is, in many ways, on fire.

Authoritarian regimes are consolidating. AI is automating inequality as much as it is innovation. Political rhetoric increasingly resembles sport. Climate disasters now compete with entertainment for airtime. And truth? Well, truth has become something we now negotiate, rather than recognise.

So what does it mean—seriously, and sincerely—to smile in this moment?

It means recognising that a smile without awareness is just another mask.

But a smile with awareness—with pain, with memory, with resistance—is a form of radical humanity.

Smile as a Leadership Strategy?

Let’s turn this lens inward. What does a “smile” look like in leadership, diplomacy, business, or even family right now?

It might look like: