Current doggishness does not require 50 dog friends. It requires three reliable, calm, familiar dogs. Quit the chaotic dog park. Opt for structured playdates.
The primary driver of the "current update" is the ingestion of the concept "dog" into the dataset of Large Language Models (LLMs).
When a user prompts an AI to "act like a dog," the model does not access a soul or a biological history; it accesses a linguistic statistical probability. It retrieves "woof," "pant," "loyal," and "ball." In this digital space, doggishness is flattened into a list of keywords. The AI performs doggishness perfectly without ever being a dog.
This creates a paradox:
The "updated" doggishness is therefore a curated, sanitized version of the animal—a perfect loop of expected behaviors.
If we are to update doggishness for the present, perhaps we need a return to the original spirit: not performative rebellion, but genuine indifference to approval. To be doggish now would mean:
The truly doggish person today is not the influencer or the troll. It is the one who, like Diogenes’ dog, scratches its fleas in public and simply doesn’t care if you’re watching. current doggishness updated
Separation anxiety is not new, but its expression has mutated. Current doggishness includes digital separation protest. Owners report that their dogs whine not just when they leave the house, but when they close a laptop lid or put on shoes associated with leaving. The dog has learned the rituals of remote work ending. This is a 2023-specific update: the dog resents the commute, because the commute now means the owner disappears for 10+ hours, not 30 minutes.
Published: October 2023 | Reading Time: 8 Minutes
There’s a particular kind of joy that comes from watching a dog be exactly who it is: unbothered, exuberant, baffled by socks, and blissfully present. Lately I’ve been keeping a small journal of those moments — a slow-motion catalog of the little behaviors, moods, and quirks that make life with a dog endlessly entertaining and oddly instructive. Here’s the latest update from the field. Current doggishness does not require 50 dog friends
If current trends hold, by 2025 we will see:
The updated dog will be more self-aware, more reactive, and more fragile than its ancestors. But also more communicative. Because paradoxically, as doggishness becomes more anxious, it also becomes more readable. A stressed dog in 2023 shows it clearly—if we learn to see.