Let's all live a little more like dogs
Yep, another longer one, but I really can't figure out where to shorten this one. Do feel free to email me with your thoughts or suggestions!
I love most animals, but I'm a dog person over everything else. Something about that unfiltered joy they have on their faces when you come home, the free affection, the love, the excitement. It just always lifts my spirits, regardless of how bad a time I've been having. In fact, that joy is something I've always been a little jealous of. Dogs just seem so free.
So the question you'll likely ask here is "oh no, is he going to take ages to get to the point again?". Yes, yes I am. But bear with it anyway.
I was listening to Trevor Noah's podcast a while back, an episode with Arthur Brooks and the conversation drifted onto dogs. Brooks made a point that sent me back down an old path: dogs and humans have basically the same limbic system, (the part of the brain that handles raw emotion). The big difference between us and them is that they feel whatever they feel without a queue of conditions attached to it. They don't review it first. It just hits them, and they immerse themselves in it.
So a dog and human's limbic system does the same job: generate the emotion, fast, before the thinking brain gets a say. What's different is the next layer. Our neocortex is enormous by comparison, and it's the part that does the narrating. It takes a feeling and immediately asks what it means, how it compares to what everyone else seems to be feeling, whether you're allowed to be feeling it at all. One feeling hits and we attach 101 questions to it. Dogs don't have much of that layer. We have a lot of it. Which might explain why a dog can go from asleep to fully overjoyed in about two seconds, and we can't get through a day without a small panel meeting about whether that small thing justifies expressing happiness openly.
When you actually watch what a dog needs to be happy, the list is short and sweet. Food. Somewhere warm and dry. Room to run. People who look after them. Someone to play with. And most importantly, someone to love, without complication. No dog has ever lain awake obsessing over why they're not getting a promotion that's not even on the table, or a car that tries to say something about who they are. They just need the basics covered and someone worth loving nearby.
They just need the basics covered and someone worth loving nearby.
Our family dog is the one that taught me all of this. I'd throw her toy, she'd sprint after it, and the second she caught it, something interesting happened: nothing. The "getting it" did almost nothing for her. What she wanted was for me to chase her for it, or start the game again. If I ever won a round of tug of war, she wouldn't take her prize and climb onto a podium. She'd trot straight back and drop it at my feet, ready to go again. She wasn't interested in owning the toy. She was interested in the game.
There's a neuroscience answer for why, and it's a good one. Researchers Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson spent years studying what they call "wanting" and "liking," and found they're run by different systems in the brain. Dopamine, it turns out, isn't the reward chemical everyone assumes it is (I bet a lot of us have heard the opposite on social media). It's the pursuit chemical. It fires hardest during the chase and drops off fast once you actually have the thing. Our dog was accurately feeling the good part. We're wired the same way. We just call it ambition, and forget to notice when the chasing was the part we were enjoying.
She wasn't interested in owning the toy. She was interested in the game.
The other thing I learned from her? A different approach to dealing with feeling down or rough. When she was sad or ill, she never wanted stuff. She wanted contact. She'd find one of us, lean in, and just be near. She didn't need new toys, a new bed, new jackets or any of that. Just proximity to someone who cared. It's the same secure-base behaviour developmental psychologists first documented in human infants, the instinct to seek out a trusted person when distressed rather than self-soothe alone.
It's weird. I think a lot of us have this "I'm a grown adult, I'm smarter than a dog, I'm smarter than an infant" reflex, and somehow use it to ignore the stuff they actually get right. I'm not saying that's you, but there was definitely a little bit of that in a past version of me.
Current me is still working on reorganising my brain. Not throw out ambition-oriented goals, just stop treating it as the main event. You can't have a real journey without a destination in mind, after all. I've got the basic necessities. I've got more ways to see and experience the world than most humans in history ever had access to. What I need (and have) is just good people, people I care about and who care back, and a bit less noise & self-consciousness about the rest.
I can't picture a dog being embarrassed. Not about being overjoyed at something small, or about wanting someone's attention and just asking for it. That's the neocortex again: the same layer that gives us narrative also gives us self-consciousness, the part that checks how a feeling looks from the outside before it lets you have it. Dogs skip that check entirely. I can't tell you how to feel, but for me, feeling a thing all the way through, without first running it past an imaginary audience, feels like freedom.
I can't tell you how to feel, but for me, feeling a thing all the way through, without first running it past an imaginary audience, feels like freedom.
I'm not saying scrap the career or the goals. I still like winning things, same as anyone. But I've started noticing that the destinations I've hit rarely feel like the best part. The promotion was nice. What I actually feel proud of, looking back, is the run leading up to it. Same with people who get married: the wedding is a day, the relationship is the thing that was happening the whole time, the part worth being present for. If marriage is a destination at all, most of us were never really racing toward it. We were enjoying the run.
So my approach now (still being refined) is fewer conditions on the good feelings. A shorter list of what actually needs securing. And a bit more attention paid to the chase. Because, dog or human, that's apparently where the fun was hiding the whole time.
The Editor's session
My first instinct was to send this one to the Mentor, but I don't think a structured plan is what's needed here. I think it's just generating awareness of the blockers we put up. So for once, this isn't one that's for Think Further. It's just me thinking out loud about how I'd like to hold things a bit differently.
Something to think about
I'll leave this one to you. If I've laid out my thoughts properly, there's probably plenty you're already thinking about.
If something here landed, or opened something you'd rather not work through alone, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. The best issues come from real stories, so if this one stirred something in yours, write to me at desk@thinkfurther.uk.