The Happiness Report: Zombies At the Beach

Yesterday at the beach I saw a dog that reminded me what it feels like to be a healthy human.  It was a tiny brown poodle with an aqua-green sweater that more than made up for its size in sassiness, sexiness, energy, and as Iggy Pop would say, lust for life.  The sad part in the picture were the humans around the dog.  The energetic poodle was jumping up and down trying to get its owners to run and play, with no success.  The stupid humans couldn’t get off their phones.  They were just trying to get a video of their dog to post online.  But they were just emotionally dead humans, stressed out and unable to live that moment. 

The little fucker wouldn’t sit still, of course.  And the humans had to chase her around, getting a momentary glimpse of what feeling free and spontaneous feels like, plus some much-needed exercise.  I doubt they felt anything, but in any case, little sassy miss Tina Turner tried her best to reconnect her owners with both the emotional and the physical reality they live in.  All of that thanks to a little months-old dog, who should earn the title of family life coach and psychologist.

So many humans are becoming dependent on dogs to remind them what feelings are.  We have become so emotionally numb that we don’t know what’s good for us anymore. Dogs and other animals have a much richer emotional world than the modern human.  I know because I keep seeing happy dogs with depressed owners at the beach. Some of these dogs are teaching their zombie owners how to feel again, how to love again. How to live, and how to not care.  How to smile even though you have a thorn stuck in your paw.

Before humans discovered anti-depressants, there were dogos. But our addiction to canines reveals a sad truth:  rather than adopting and nurturing our own emotions, we adopted dogs as convenient substitutes.  We haven’t dared touch our own scary, suppressed, unruly emotions and really discover ourselves.  Discover true love, true compassion, raw happiness in the way a dog gets to love the moment, then move on to the next moment for no reason.  If anything, we treat dogs in the same way we have treated our own emotions: we tell them to sit, wait, and be quiet.

What about all the other animals?  I’m sure a great number are also much more emotionally astute than us.  They deserve this world so much more than we do because they can actually appreciate all the things we are destroying: the fresh air, the cool, clear waves at the beach.  Dogs and other animals are too busy being happy to commit genocides and financial fraud.  Animals live every moment of their life on Earth, while humans spend too much time terrified of time, and of the moment.  By the time they’ve finished having this depressing conversation with themselves, the time has disappeared.  And the dog which was the only thing that reminded them how to be human again, has lived its life.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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