Dogs, Time, and the Art of Living

There’s this thing with owning dogs¹—and "owning" here needs to be taken with a salt-shaker full of qualifiers because, let’s be honest, no one really owns a dog in the traditional "property rights" sense any more than someone can own, say, gravity or love or the color blue. I call it The Return.

Here’s how it works: You leave the house for some indeterminate amount of time—could be hours, could be the span of a single sneeze²—and when you return, the dogs greet you with this borderline insane level of enthusiasm, as if you’ve not just come home from the office or the mailbox or wherever, but instead returned from a 20-year odyssey worthy of Homer. I mean, they’re overjoyed in a way that feels almost embarrassing to witness, like you’ve walked in on someone in the throes of some great private epiphany about the nature of existence.

This is The Return, and it happens every single time.

Noodle and Flapjack³, my co-pilots in life, have—whether they realize it or not—become key players in what I’ve come to view as an ongoing, and very dog-specific, inquiry into joy, time, and the human condition⁴.

Consider:

Dogs, for all intents and purposes, don’t experience time the way we do. They live entirely in the Now. Whereas us humans can only do obsessive mental cataloging of past mistakes and future anxieties.
The "average" dog lifespan⁵ hovers somewhere between 10 and 13 years, which if you map it out in human time, basically means they’re living in a kind of permanent state of accelerated time, where each day is roughly the equivalent of a week for us.
As a result, dogs seem to exist in a perpetual loop of reunion-induced euphoria⁶, where every single instance of you walking back through the door is greeted as if you’re some unholy mashup of John Wick (after rescuing a puppy), Beyoncé, and Santa Claus carrying a bag of treats.

Now, contrast this with your average human interaction, which is almost entirely governed by social obligation, habitual politeness, and the overarching sense that time is something to be managed—not experienced. Take, for example, my weekly visits to my mother. These visits follow a similar script each time: stories are repeated, complaints are lodged, mild judgments are passive aggressively handed down like inherited knick-knacks. And yes, there are absolutely moments where I find myself mentally timing the visit, watching the clock with a level of precision union workers would find unreasonable.

But then I think about Noodle and Flapjack, these two absurdly enthusiastic creatures who seem to have found a loophole in time itself—greeting each moment as if it’s brand new, filled with infinite possibilities. And it hits me that these visits to my mother—however repetitive, however tinged with a subtle sense of erosion—are, in fact, rare and fleeting. One day, these moments will be nothing but memory, a kind of emotional phantom limb I’ll wish I could touch again.

This realization has slowly infiltrated other areas of my life. Take work, for example. I used to see it as a necessary evil, a kind of soul-numbing slog that was designed to slowly drain me of all vitality while simultaneously funding the actual life I wanted to live. Every meeting, every email, every asinine conference call felt like a death by a thousand paper cuts, stretched over an indefinite number of Mondays.

But then something shifted. I started to approach work with a mindset that—while not quite "dog-like" (because, let’s be honest, humans lack that particular superpower)—was at least dog-adjacent. Instead of treating work like some dystopian grind, I began looking for these tiny moments of victory—a report that came out clean on the first draft, a problem I actually managed to solve, the feeling of helping a colleague who maybe just needed someone to listen. What I began to realize was that these small, seemingly insignificant moments weren’t just part of the grind—they were the grind. They were what actually gave meaning to the whole damn thing.

Humans can feel joy, of course. We have our moments—finding a parking spot right in front of the store, or when the barista gets your basic Venti half-caf, iced, oat milk caramel macchiato, upside-down with two pumps of hazelnut, one pump of raspberry, light on the ice, extra hot foam, a drizzle of sugar-free mocha, shaken not stirred, with a double shot of blonde espresso and topped with a sprinkle of cinnamon, hold the caramel drizzle order finally right⁷. But these moments are like fireflies—brief flashes of joy that blink on and off in the dark of our daily lives. Dogs, on the other hand, live in a world where joy is the default setting, and everything else is just noise.

This led me down a somewhat bizarre mental rabbit hole⁸:

Are dogs actually time travelers who experience life in a totally different temporal framework than we do?
Is their constant joy just a side effect of some kind of cosmic jet lag?
If dogs are Time Lords, what does that make cats? (Probably still aloof, but with space-time manipulation powers they’re clearly not using for good.)

But I digress⁹.

The point—if there is one—might be this: We could learn a thing or two from our furry little friends. Not the part about sniffing butts¹⁰, but the part about finding joy in the minutiae of everyday life.

Imagine, for a second, that we approached each day with the same level of enthusiasm as Noodle and Flapjack exhibit when they see me picking up their leash for a walk. Or that we greeted our loved ones—even the ones who drive us absolutely bonkers—with the kind of joy that’s usually reserved for Christmas morning. It would be exhausting, sure, but also a kind of radical act in a world that often feels like it’s running on fumes.

Of course, there’s always the alternative: We trudge through life, constantly waiting for the next big thing—the promotion, the vacation, the achievement that will finally justify all the effort we’ve been putting in—only to find ourselves measuring out our days in coffee spoons¹¹ and Netflix binge sessions.

Meanwhile, our dogs live like every single day is the best day of their lives, and every meal is a Michelin-starred feast.

The lessons I've learned from Noodle and Flapjack go beyond just finding more joy in life. They've taught me about loyalty, about living in the moment, about forgiveness (ever seen a dog hold a grudge? Me neither), and about the healing power of physical affection.

They've shown me that every day is a new adventure, full of possibilities. That sometimes, the best thing you can do is roll around in the grass just because it feels good. That a good stretch can solve a multitude of problems. And there's no shame in asking for what you need, whether that's food, attention, or a belly rub.

So now, when I’m sitting with my mother and she’s launching into her well-worn tale of high school prom drama for the umpteenth time, I try to listen as if it’s brand new. I lean in, ask questions, look for details I may have missed before. Because this—these little mundane moments, this "garbage time" we spend with the people we love—is the real stuff of life.

And at work, when the tide of emails threatens to pull me under, I try to channel some of that dog-like joy. I wag my metaphorical tail, look for the small victories, and try to savor them when they come. Some days, I even succeed.

And if all else fails, I take a cue from Noodle and Flapjack and indulge in the simple, profound pleasure of a good nap. Dogs are, if nothing else, masters of rest.

Now, Noodle and Flapjack are staring at me with their patented "The Look™"—which, for those unfamiliar, is a kind of intense, nonverbal insistence that they are being grossly neglected, and only undivided attention can rectify this cosmic injustice. So I’ll take the hint and stop here, probably call my mom later, and remind myself—once again—that these moments are the whole point. Even if they sometimes feel like they’re stretching on for dog years.

Let’s be real here: "ownership" is a formality at best. The reality is that dogs allow us to cohabitate with them in exchange for food, belly rubs, and the occasional fetch session. It’s basically a barter system, except they get the better end of the deal.
Because, to dogs, time is both a totally meaningless abstraction and the entire reason for their joy/existential anxiety. You leave for five minutes and return, and to them, it’s as if you’ve traversed the entire cosmos and lived to tell the tale.
Yes, their names are Noodle and Flapjack. No, this is not some hipster foodie flex. It’s just these names fit their respective personalities in ways impossible to explain without sounding slightly insane.
Not that dogs are deliberately conducting a study of human behavior, but rather that their mere existence makes us reflect on our own neuroses, shortcomings, and bizarre attachment to the concept of "productivity."
Which, let’s face it, is a ridiculous concept when applied to dogs, whose lifespans vary so dramatically that "average" becomes meaningless. A Chihuahua’s "average" is a Great Dane’s extreme old age. It’s like trying to average out the lifespan of a goldfish in my care and a Galápagos tortoise.
Which, in human terms, would probably result in a diagnosis of some kind of manic disorder. But when dogs do it, we call it "endearing" and laugh at their exuberance instead of immediately recommending therapy.
This kind of joy is, for humans, as rare and fleeting as a perfect parking spot on a crowded street. It’s the exception, not the rule. For dogs, it’s the baseline experience. They exist in a perpetual state of caffeinated bliss, and they don’t even need an espresso to get there. And if you order coffee like that, this is why we can't have nice things.
Which, to be clear, is the kind of thought experiment that sounds reasonable at 3 AM but absolutely unhinged in the light of day. But at 3 AM, it feels completely plausible that dogs are temporal anomalies sent here to teach us a lesson about the folly of human ambition.
I’m fully aware that I’m off on a tangent here, but tangents are sort of my specialty. They’re like little mental cul-de-sacs where I like to take my thoughts for a spin before eventually returning to the main road.
Though, admittedly, if humans did sniff butts as a form of greeting, it would certainly eliminate a lot of small talk.
T.S. Eliot was obviously wrong about a lot of things, but he was especially wrong about how humans measure out their lives. If he’d owned a dog, he’d have realized that the proper metric is tail wags, not coffee spoons.