Let me start by saying that I love dogs. I had a good boy as a kid that is immortalized in my dreams. When I eventually move out of Metro Vancouver I will be certain to make a new canine friend as soon as possible.
I also spent a fair amount of pandemic time using Hinge—a dating app I’m sure many readers will at least tangentially have heard of. Hinge is thought to let you express and personalize yourself more than the more concise Tinder and Bumble that came before it. In doing so you are given just a few precious text caption, photo and audio opportunities to let people know what you are all about.
I’ve noticed a trend in how Hinge users choose to describe themselves. Even with very limited opportunities to showcase personality, there is an overwhelming energy being dedicated to a certain topic. In this increasingly tech driven world, lonely souls are reaching out to connect over a key element:
Dogs.
People are writing about dogs.
…But it just wouldn’t be one of my articles if I didn’t set up a hook before veering into neurophilosophy, so I’m going to suddenly talk about Friedrich Nietzsche.
A Detour to Nietzsche
When he famously declared that “God is dead…” he was really saying that our shared roadmap, Northstar and organizing principle had been lost. As religion waned in favour of the rational mind, we no longer agreed on a target to aim at above all else. We suddenly lacked a shared model of the highest good.
This was troubling news given that humans are pre-programmed to seek greater meaning. “What sacred games shall we have to invent?” was Nietzsche’s way of saying we’d have to point our big ol’ purpose-seeking prefrontal brains at something of meaning so we don’t spiral into total emptiness.
And how are we doing? What sacred games have we found to replace God?
I would say we’ve shifted our spiritual attention to intellectual ideas, academic discourse and politics… but also transferred our search for awe and wonder over to concerts, movies, social media and celebrities (there’s just no way Captain Jack Sparrow could be abusive!).
In my decade of providing psychotherapy my clients’ lives have suggested that these new gods aren't quite doing the trick. People so often struggle with meaninglessness amidst gruelling careers that sprung from a quest for status to make up for abandonment and betrayal they experienced when they were younger.
Instead of life feeling like an RPG-style video game where suffering is justified by the pursuit of a master quest, all too often life is about killing time through leisure while trying to stay distracted from existential angst:
So what are people rallying around on the dating apps? Can the social anthropology of Hinge help me to know which sacred icons single humans place at the peak of their values hierarchy?
Yup. It’s dogs.
Are You a Dog Person? Because…
In many cases, 3/3 of the about me boxes had something to do with dogs. In other words, when it comes to Hinge for many folks dogs are the top dog of social identity. In that last screenshot, dogs seem to be the most important thing in conceptual existence at the very peak of what it even means to be alive.
It works backwards too:
That one made me laugh. No doubt they are protecting themselves from the hordes of moustache-twirling dog-hating Disney villains out there looking for love.
To be fair though, Hinge users aren’t exclusively describing themselves with wolfy woofers. It’s also food and watching The Office. Preferences around coffee and pizza are very commonly the first line of self-description on Hinge and The Office stands out as a cultural anchor to lead us to port:
I know, Heather. That’s exactly what I’m saying in this article. We have come to place minor identifications as central axioms to our very being, religiously significant to the point of being amongst the most important—or even the one thing you need to know about us.
The relationship with fictional characters even takes precedence over potential real life intimacy.
You aren’t alone—a lot of people’s love language is charcuterie these days.
Look, I’m not so analytically possessed that I don’t realize people do well to break the ice over small and safe topics. I understand that what starts with sharing how important Michael Scott is can pave the way to later sharing vulnerability.
But if we just leave it at that we’ll miss the opportunity to dig deeper and discover the fascinating nuances that make people unique and loveable. I’m a firm believer that the world needs our songs sung at full volume… and dog whistles aren’t even audible.
Three Reasons We Play Small
Here are my thoughts on what keeps everyone talking about dogs, cheese+cracker plates and Steve Carrell’s character from a show that ended a decade ago instead of shining from somewhere deeper:
It Feels Safer To Follow Trends
Shame is the interruption of spontaneity. At one point as children our innocent self-expression was injured by the criticism of others. It hurt really fucking bad. And so began the overworking sympathetic nervous system—desperate to protect us from ever feeling that sort of pain again. I want to be enough.
A common safety tactic is to avoid standing out. An obvious way to do this is to copy what others do. We begin to unconsciously study what others say and how they go about doing it. Look at all the people on social media just repeating things others have said like formulaic bots.
It’s great that dating you is like finding an extra McNugget in your happy meal but are anyone’s souls singing with these copy+pasted rote repetitions? Does the faux-safety of blending in overpower the fear of being original? Is a part of anyone feeling sad to be squished down in favour of fitting a mould?
There is of course the dopamine response of, “Yes! I did the thing others did and I am accepted!” We are rewarded for suppressing whatever strange, unique and almost always highly relatable parts of us we are scared to speak from.
Which is a nice transition to…
We Are Afraid To Know Ourselves Deeper
It is scary to become who are we fully. To do that, we have to willingly face our shadow—the repository of all the things we hide from ourselves. The shadow contains everything that we learned was inappropriate and that we come to automatically shove down. We learn to self-reject.
The greater we strive to fit a template the larger our shadow. “I’m such a good person” creates “I must not be a bad person.” The pressure of this is incredible. If you think we can just decide we are virtuous without integrating the shadow, you will quickly discover that the impulses transform into anxiety, depression, autopilot behaviour, ‘teakettle’ resentment, addiction and numbness. We project what we don’t like about ourselves onto others and seek to control the world into what we think it should be without healing ourselves first (sound familiar, Twitter?).
On a spiritual level, knowing ourselves is even more terrifying because the self that we imagine to be who we are ultimately doesn’t even exist. A separate ego is just a construct of the front brain that we’ve really only evolved into its modern form in the last hundred thousand years.
If we continue to know who we are, the last stop of the train is learning that we aren’t our small self at all—we are the totality of the universe. Our blood circulates under the same natural harmony as the rotating planets. We are inseparable from the collective homeostatic cosmos that birthed us. Our name and human identity are just psychological accessories to our larger being. That’s a lot, so is it any wonder the blue pill is so appealing?
If we project heroism onto a celebrity we are safe from owning the unimaginable power we have as energetic consciousness witnessing its own eternal nature. If today means looking beyond Pomeranians and pizza tomorrow could mean the death of our egos and so it’s safer to just share our flirt to roast ratio.
Society Doesn’t Teach Human Intimacy
Across my career in treating military veterans I noticed a pattern with severely traumatized individuals. Forget safe intimacy with humans—even basic trust was not possible. With humans appearing as monstrously frightful, veterans would instead develop an unbreakable love for dogs and animals.
And this makes sense. Dogs are so often pure goodness. Semi-psychic, unconditionally loving angels unspoiled by the human propensity for deception and betrayal. Safe attachment figures that activate similar systems of serotonergic and oxytocin-mediated wellbeing.
As beautiful as this love can be, transferring all of their emotional safety over to Rover eventually got in the way of recovery. To get better, risks would need to be taken to let other humans in before the world became very small. And when it comes to the heart, a lot of our worlds are indeed getting smaller.
While I’m sure that Becky down the street is not totally turning to Barksley for her entire wellbeing, the increase of dogs as paramount on dating apps can’t help but remind me of the veterans.
It is only recently that pop-culture is starting to feature more down to earth and gritty human narratives (see Netflix’s Love or Disney+’s Dave—you know it’s accurate if you are cringing) instead of constantly sensationalized stories that only make us feel more lonely. Arguably society has reflected back a culture of toxic positivity that alienates us with a shameful barrier from the remarkable spectrum of human emotion.
Dogs are a shortcut because they’ll love us no matter what. But just because our family’s loved us conditionally doesn’t mean you can’t find less conditional love in adulthood—people who can smile at your broken parts while still having at least a basic grasp of human language (and get a dog too, they’re awesome).
Three Costs of Playing Small
It is my experience that avoiding depth and suffering is not a pathway to lasting joy. I have instead found both as a clinician and human that the cure is in the poison. If I had royalties for the number of times I quoted Joseph Campbell’s “In the cave you fear is the treasure you seek” his estate would be sending me new Nike’s every week.
Let me then share some potential consequences of culture continuing to trend towards the shallows: Brief thought experiments on what can happen if a surface level, youth-obsessed and death-denying culture manages to alienate an entire people from the roots of who they are:
Shame Is Deepened
Perfectionism tries to guard us from rejection but is actually a very stressful energy to be around. It tends to only impress others who are equally conspiratorial in avoiding vulnerability.
When we hide the full range of our emotions and ideas things become so frightfully narrow that our scope of what is OK becomes suffocating. The reward of love is restricted to but a few options. We have a lot to thank queer culture for since it pokes holes in routine and often very boring options on how we are allowed to be humans.
Don’t forget, we were all weirdos as kids and it is traumatizing to that little one inside every time you rigidly stick to the script. It says that spontaneity isn’t OK, which is true madness because the universe has proliferated through its eternity of evolution by expressing its manifest truth without any second guessing. This human trend of fearing our weirdness is very new on the overall scale of the cosmos.
Flawed but honest individuals are very magnetic. You can’t help but relax around someone who stopped judging themselves because it means they aren’t going to judge you either. They’re a beacon of redemption with a relieving reminder that we’ve been chasing a life raft despite that we float perfectly fine.
Potential Is Lost
Confronting anxiety directly makes us more courageous. When we are courageous, we express ourselves from something bigger. We are being honest and allowing the expression of eons of evolution that came before us. We are making friends with our DNA that has been informed by the entire biological history of the macroscopic universe.
Do we really want to block this to avoid getting our feelings hurt? Can that trade off ever be justified?
Repeatedly expressing ourselves with others is like dusting away the dirt burying an ancient artifact. Each time, you see more of the beautiful buried design. Empathy with others doesn’t just help us feel understood. It actually builds our minds through reward circuitry that activates our latent genetic pathways.
You are so much more than you know and only courageous and honest interactions will reveal how far that goes. Fitting in is the plan b to what you are meant to be and the world needs heroes who shine from the depths of their being.
Society Fills With Bad Faith Actors
This is what can happen if society floods with folks not only purporting surface level values, but by chasing unquestioned ideals. When alienated from our deeper truths—including the yucky shadow matter that we like to pretend isn’t ours—we gravitate towards what our thinking brains tell us we should be.
We detach from the intuitive guidance of our feelings and start to judge and police not only ourselves, but others. I may not know who I am deeply, but I see everyone around me arguing that we are supposed to be a certain way. If I can be judged for not fitting in, I’d better also judge others because who are they to be themselves?
Even the positive quest to dismantle social norms and create a world of safety and equality can become a virtue comparison game, hijacking everyone’s inner critics and prompting emergency measures to avoid guilt and shame. In my years of practice I have never seen an individual cured through shame, so why do we think an entire society will be?
Top down ideals tend to make us scared of being wrong. In contrast, doing inner work to integrate our past traumas almost always connects us to the intuitive, hard-wired instinct to love others and tolerate differences. In an age of hyper-polarity, never has it been more important to engage some type of healing that connects us to our implicit nature as collaborative and loving beings.
Coda
First chance I get I’ll be adopting a yellow lab. I’ll love him like an extension of myself and enjoy the spiritually psychic relationship that people tend to have with dogs. My heart will soar and I’ll sob weary tears when I bury him. If I’m still single at that point he will probably even be in my Hinge profile.
For now though, I hope you took this as an opportunity to examine yourself a little deeper. Are you playing small? Are you hiding the most interesting aspects of who you are? Are you taking risks to allow intimacy with others?
To those who like swimming in the deep end—and to those living their best brunch-life with Dog the Bouncy Snuggler at their feet on a patio over Sunday mimosas—enjoy the journey and take all my proddings with a grain of salt. Every day is a cosmic miracle and we’re all doing our best to dance with joy and tragedy alike.
Carson writes in the third person following all of his articles. He directs a team of 18 counsellors at Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre—a trauma-informed wellness space that specializes in psychedelic integration therapy. This year is an entrepreneurial push for him, but when time allows he’ll be creating a lot more content than he is now.
Wow, what a beautiful piece Carson. It started off light and gradually got more profound - lovely format.
Dogs certainly are at least semi-psychic, and who's to say humans aren't? The potential for humans to connect with each other the way they do with dogs is largely unrealized, and I think that's one of the main sources of existential loneliness that plagues the modern Westerner. Attempts to reach out for that sort of connection hit a wall - and that wall is something like the persona, in an attempt to hide all the aspects of oneself that are "unacceptable" socially. It's only in the presence of judgement-free loving kindness (or alcohol) that people begin to slowly unravel and allow themselves be seen. This is what we are simultaneously terrified of and yearn for - causing us to look for it in all sorts of strange places.
The Spirit of the Times which we unconsciously become embedded in as we socialize condemns acting 'weird' or 'crazy', and it takes real conscious courage to do otherwise. The first step for me was recognizing that sometimes my instincts and intuitions are asking me to move my body differently. But I wouldn't allow myself to, out of an overwhelming sense of social anxiety. And that sort of anxiety, as I discovered, isn't personal to me - many people I know are unable to embody the gentle requests of the lower aspects of the psyche. The fear of being seen runs deep.
The questions at the end are short and full of meaning: "Are you playing small? Are you hiding the most interesting aspects of who you are? Are you taking risks to allow intimacy with others?"
Certainly yes, to all 3 questions.
"Are you playing small?" It's funny how we think of false confidence as a great sin, but not false modesty (as phrased by Alan Watts). I see that also as a form of deceit, hiding your truth from others which is another way of hiding it from those condemnatory aspects in yourself.
“Are you hiding the most interesting aspects of who you are?” Well certainly, the most interesting parts are by definition those not commonly held by others. The parts of us containing our greatest potential for beauty and love are also the most repressed exactly because they highlight our differences.
“Are you taking risks to allow intimacy with others?” I see this as the recognition that intimacy is risk to the possibility of malevolence in others. To do so wisely requires us to learn how to see others’ intentions. To learn how to read the patterns in others requires us to also become aware of their manifestation in us. Therefore to break out of the cycle of loneliness we must first learn to see the darkness within and courageously contend with it.
Can't wait to read more of your work!
Sam U.