Have a Bad Day

What the day is

Have a Bad Day is observed on November 19. It is a joke at the expense of a phrase, and the phrase has earned it.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. What it reacts to is documented well.

Have a nice day spread through American service work in the 1960s and 1970s, helped along by a piece of graphic design. In 1963 a commercial artist named Harvey Ball drew a yellow smiling face for an insurance company trying to lift morale after a difficult merger. He was paid a nominal fee, spent about ten minutes on it, and never registered any rights. Two brothers in Philadelphia later paired the face with the slogan and sold tens of millions of buttons.

The backlash followed quickly, because the phrase had become required rather than meant. Comedians worked it hard, visitors from other countries cited it as evidence of American insincerity, and have a bad day emerged as the obvious inversion.

Underneath the joke sits something researchers take seriously. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild described the demand that workers produce a required feeling as emotional labor, and separated surface acting, displaying an emotion you do not have, from deep acting. Later work has consistently linked surface acting to exhaustion and burnout. Requiring cheerfulness from people who are not cheerful carries a measurable cost, and it falls on the lowest-paid workers in the building.

There is a gentler reading available too: that permitting a bad day is healthier than insisting on a good one. Attempts to suppress an unwanted emotion outright generally work poorly and cost effort that shows up elsewhere.

How to take part

• Let yourself have an ordinary bad day without treating it as a personal failure.
• Answer how are you honestly, with someone who can take the honest version.
• Be conspicuously kind to anyone whose job requires them to smile at you.
• Skip the automatic pleasantry and say something specific instead.
• Take the joke as intended. It is not an instruction to inflict one on anybody else.