March 21, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode, Mark Rowland attempts to unlock the wisdom of dogs and discusses what they know about living a good life. He takes on some of life’s biggest, weightiest questions, like, what is meaning, how should we live, and explores them through the lens of our four-legged companions. It’s about philosophy. It’s about dogs, and it’s about the age old question of how to live a good life.
Key Takeaways:
- Dogs live without the burden of reflection, which allows them to be fully present and undivided.
- Meaning in life is more important than the meaning of life—it’s found through alignment with who we are.
- Dogs are natural philosophers, offering insights through their simplicity and joy in daily life.
- Humans live two lives—lived and examined—while dogs live one, leading to greater contentment.
- Dogs embrace small pleasures with full-hearted joy, something humans often overlook.
- Love is central to a meaningful life, whether expressed through connection, passion, or presence.
For full show notes, click here!
If you enjoyed this episode with Mark Rowland, check out these other episodes:
How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag
Shamanism and Spirituality with John Mabry
How Perception Creates Reality with John Perkins
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I don't think dogs do that. You know, I picked
up this stick on the wool. Should I have picked
up that other one? I don't think they do that
kind of thing. So we have two lives because of
this ability to reflect, and the dog just has one.
I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the
dog's going to love its one life more than we
love our two lives.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:47):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
If you know me, you know that I love dogs.
In many ways, it seems that the secret to a
good life might be something that our dogs already know.
Today we're talking with philosopher and author Mark Rowlands, whose
book The Word of Dog does something remarkable. It takes
some of life's biggest, weightiest questions, like what is meaning?
(01:31):
How should we live, and explores them through the lens
of our four legged companions. For me, this conversation hit
right at the heart of When You Feed sweet Spot.
It's about philosophy, it's about dogs, and it's about the
age old question of how to live a good life.
That's a phrase I first uttered in this show's intro
over a decade ago, and one I've been chasing ever since.
(01:54):
Mark argues that reflection, the very thing that makes us
human is both our greatest strength and our biggest trap.
We talked about why meaning in life matters more than
the meaning of life, and how dogs, those blissfully unaware,
joy chasing creatures, might just be the natural philosophers we
all need. By the end of this episode, you might
(02:16):
just see your dog as more than a best friend,
but as a mentor him. Eric Zimmer and this is
the one you feed. Hi, Mark, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Thanks Eric, I'm delighted to be Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
I'm excited to talk to you. And I saw the
title of your latest book, which is called The Word
of Dog, What our canine companions can teach us about
living a good life. I knew I wanted to talk
to you right away because A we love dogs. B.
The book has some philosophy which we like. And when
I recorded the intro to this show got eleven and
a half years ago at this point, I actually used
(02:49):
that phrase in it, how to live a good life?
So you sort of just hit the absolute ven diagram
for one you feed guests. And I really enjoyed the book,
which we're going to get to in a second. But
before we start, we'll start like we always do with
the parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking
with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
(03:11):
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
(03:32):
that param means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
What's really interesting about that parable is, and this is
the philosophy me now coming out, So I apologize for that.
Who is the feeder? So the feeder is the one
who chooses which wolf to feed. But then the question is, well,
why would he or she choose one wolf rather than
the other. If they choose the bad wolf, then it
seems they're already in some way aligned with that wolf.
(03:57):
If they choose the good wolf, then they're already in
some way aligned with that wolf. So in that sense,
the feeder collapses into the wolf because the feeder is
already aligned with one of the wolves, and so there
is no feeder independently of the wolves.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
It's a very interesting idea. I think we can jump
off and sort of talk from there. Most of us, though,
we'll have the experience of we're at a decision point
or a choice point of some sort, and we recognize
these two things. Right. It could be the old classic
Devil and Angel on your shoulder or whatever it is,
but this feeling of being divided seems very common to
(04:37):
being human. So talk to me about alignment in that sense, the.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Feeling of being divided. I mean, I think the crucial
question is how much significance do you a lot to
that feeling? Does it show that your choice is a
free one? You exist independently of the choices. You can
choose the good wolf, you can choose the bad wolf,
or your choice is already made by who and what
you are.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That's interesting. In another of your books, it might have
been The Philosopher and the Wolf, you talk about memory,
and you say that there's a common way of thinking
of memory, as in what we actually remember, and you
say that these are not really the key. There's a
deeper and more I'm just going to read what you said,
a deeper and more important way of remembering a form
(05:22):
of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with
the name. This is a memory of a past that
has written itself on you, in your character and in
the life which you bring this character to bear. So
that's what you're talking about here. Right to what degree
in the moment we think we're making a choice, How
free is that choice? Because it is certainly influenced by
and conditioned by everything that's come before.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah, that's right, I mean a memory. I mean, don't
get me started on memory. Actually, my next book is
on memory book. So memory is fascinating a much, much
stranger than we have a thought. In the context of
this parable though, I think the question is to what
extent are we define by choices versus do we exist
independently of our choices? So the power will suppose is
(06:06):
that there's a person who can choose one or the
other wolf. If that's right, then it seems we would
have to exist prior to and independently of our choices.
We exist, and then we make the choices. Now, the
alternate view is, well, we're made up, we are constituted
by our choices. There's no real choice in that second sense.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
I suspect is there a middle ground though, at least
it seems to me. And I don't want to turn
this into a discussion of free will, right, but a
middle ground seems to me to be absolutely I am
deeply influenced by my past, by my memories, by my conditioning.
They actually very much constrain the choices that are available
(06:48):
to me actually in the physical world, based on what's
happened before, but also inside of me to a certain degree.
I talk about this a lot, or I think about
this a lot. Becustomer recovering drug add and the discussion
about this seems to bifiur kate into a couple of camps.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Also.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
One is the addict has no choice, they are completely
in the grips of this thing. The other is this
is all just a choice. The addict should just stop
doing this. Right And for me, I found that a
middle ground is what allows me to function, right that
I can say, well, yes I am you know, at
the moment, many many years away from it. So now
(07:26):
my level of choice is completely different to what I
had then. So I seem to have had less choice,
but there was still some choice.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
It certainly seems that way. It's a very strange view.
You know that the in fact choice is an illusion.
There's no such thing. I don't know. I really don't know.
It's a tricky question, and it depends on what we
mean by choices. The underlying idea, maybe is that there's
a difference between you know, your past fixing what you do,
when your past influencing what you do. Yes, yes, distinction.
(07:57):
So then the question is well, how do we understand
the fluencing and is there a way of understanding it?
Because the worry you write is always, well, okay, on
the one hand, you've got your past fixes what you do,
It determines what you do, is you have no choice.
The other view is, oh no, the past just influences
what you do. But what does influence mean? Because what
(08:17):
we don't want right is fully influenced simply to mean random? Okay.
Some people think, for example, that we're free to the
extent that our actions are not caused by anything. Now
I think that's a very strange and troubling view because
I mean, imagine what it would be like, Okay, for
your actions not to be caused by anything. You just
simply find yourself doing something, right, So the actions have
(08:40):
to come from you to be free in some sense.
Then the worry is, well, if that's right, how do
we understand what it means for an action to come
from you without you determining that action? Because if the
actions simply emanate from you in the sense that what
you are who you are makes those actions inevitable, then
(09:00):
there's no freedom there either. Yeah, So we need some
kind of middle ground between what you are who you are,
making you act, determining your actions. That's the idea, But
we need to understand what influence means without appealing to randomness.
That isn't going to work, right. It's one of the
hardest problems of philosophy.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
I think it is. I mean, this is how I
think about it. And again, I'm a dabbler in philosophy,
and I also recognize that my arguments, ultimately for me,
end up trying to be what's useful in living a life,
not what's technically theoretically true.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Yeah, but I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Think it's random. But I also don't think you can
unwind it enough to really be clear. So for example,
I could say, when I'm around men of you know,
my father's age, and they look a little bit angry,
I get really afraid, right, And I can make a
story that says that's because my dad was angry when
(09:55):
I was a kid, And there's probably some truth in that,
but there's probably a whole lot el going on in
there that I just like, to your point, memories that
I can't even recall. I don't know what things shaped
me in what way, because I think everything is doing
a very subtle shaping. So I don't think it's exactly random,
But I also don't think you can solve the equation
(10:15):
backwards and actually sort out all the variables completely.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, well, I mean with memory. I mean, since I
wrote that passage that you quoted, I discovered that i'd
been anticipated by the German speaking poet Rilka Rainer Maria Rilka,
who had this fantastic passage in a book called The
Notebooks of Malde Laureate's brig It was his only excursion
into the art form of a novel. He was a poet, right,
(10:41):
and he talks about the most important memories are the
ones you have to have the patience to forget them.
Once you have the patients to forget them, then eventually
they'll return, but their return in a different form. They
won't return as memories, they'll return as something else. So
he talked about memories being glance and gesture of blood,
(11:02):
not to be distinguished from who we are. I think
there's something deeply right about that. Memories of the standard sort,
so called their pisodic memories. So I remember this, I
remember doing this, I remember doing that. They're just the
sort of tip of an iceberg and a far more
significant way we'll link to our past is by way
of things that used to be memories but have now
(11:24):
come back in the different in a different form. So moods,
for example, emotions you're not quite sure where they're coming from.
They're coming from somewhere. They're coming from memories that you
once had, but they become something else. I call them
rilken memories, but it's not clear that they're really memories.
We could think of them as post memories, if you like.
That's the thing. It's the most significant link to the past. Now,
(11:46):
where that leaves us with a question of free will
is again just another very tricky question. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I'm going to pivot us towards your book, and we've
been doing some philosophizing here to start this episode off.
And one of the core ideas in the book is
that dogs are natural philosophers. Talk to me about what
you mean by that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Well, the claim that dogs and natural phosphus. It was
originally made by Socrates, the ancient Greek phiosph but he
was joking. He didn't take it seriously. Basically, it was
a bad pun on his part. But dogs liking what
they know and not liking what they don't know. He
wasn't really being serious, but I think there's actually something
to it. It's not entirely clear why that is, but
(12:27):
I expect that the philosophical worries and anxieties are sometimes
a bit like diseases, diseases that we suffer from, and dogs,
being dogs are not human, they don't suffer from the
same diseases as us. The disease model of philosophy is
associated with Ludwig Wiggenstein. So you know, dogs get PAVO.
We don't. We have philosophical worries dogs don't. And so
(12:51):
that was one of the kind of intuitions that drove
the writing of the book. I suppose I was struck
by this initially when everyday Shadow, who's a German, sheper
Shadow and I go for a walk on the canal
that runs behind the house, and in the mornings, lined
up along the bank of the canal will be scores
of iguanas lined up a fairly regular intervals, and only Shadow,
(13:13):
he takes off hundreds of yards north of the iguanas,
just peel off into the water, swim to the other side,
and climb up the other bank and stay there for
the rest of the day. Okay, So the very next morning, right,
they're back again and shadows start begins this process of
exiling the iguanas all over again. And it struck me eventually.
(13:35):
I mean it took me a long time, but you know,
wheels turned slowly sometimes, and it struck me eventually. This
was a bit like the myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus
was immortal who offended the gods. The gods punished him
by making him roll a large rock up a hill
for all eternity. When he gets to the top, the
rock slips from his grasp, rolls back down to the bottom,
(13:55):
and he has to start all over again. So the
idea is, if you replace the rock with the igua,
then you've got pretty much the same sort of situation
here now Sisyphus when when Phostop's talk about this myth,
he figures in two ways. The first is as the
epitome of a meaningless existence. So all we god is
just repetitive activity. It aims only at its own repetition.
(14:18):
There's nothing that we're can as success or failure, so
a meaningless existence. But secondly, Sisyphus is also taken as
an allegory for human life. We fight our way to
work in the morning, maybe, and then we spend eight
hours or so in this place where we do various
things with mixed results, probably quite modest results, and results
that will soon be wiped away by times passage. Then
(14:39):
we fight our way home again in the evening, perhaps
at home waiting for us at children perhaps not, you know,
but if there are, then in a few years time
they will have grown up and will probably doing the
same kinds of things that we did. And so every
day in our lives seems like one of Sisyphus's steps
up the hill. We leave it eventually to our children,
but it's the same overall idea stuff cheeriou stuff, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(15:03):
And this is the challenge of Sisvas' life is meaningless,
and our lives are recognizably Sissyphian. But it struck me
that actually, this again was I think probably the most
significant inituation which guided me writing this book at all,
was that Shadow was immune to this problem. This is
probably the most meaningful part of his day. And so
(15:23):
I said, well, I suppose that's right, because this was
just an intuition on my but this is the most
part of his day. How would things have to be
in order for that to be true? And this basically
started the various themes I talked about in the book.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Yeah, it's a fascinating way of looking at things. And
I do think this is a deep philosophical question for
all of us, or a spiritual question some people would
frame it as. But it is in the face of
the fact that pretty much everything we do will be
erased by the sands of time. And you know, how
does anything actually matter within that? And you talk about
(15:58):
Socrates in a second way, and you say, you know,
Socrates supposedly said the unexamined life is not worth living,
and then you sort of challenge that idea by saying, well,
as a dog's life not worth living, and you come
to a very different conclusion.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, yeah, so I suspect that there are certain aspects
of a dog's life that make it just as meaningful
and perhaps more meaningful than our lives. But by meaning,
I mean there's two ways. I think what we're going
to get clear is what this talk of meaning is.
So I mean when people told the meaning in life,
they used to think of some kind of external purpose.
(16:35):
Let's suppose it was supplied by God. God says, right,
you know, this is why I'm creating you humans. This
is what you're here for. That's your purpose. It's not
meaning in that sense right that the book is talking about.
It's what some people call meaning in life rather than
meaning of life. The idea is what's required for you
to experience your life as meaningful? And this is the problems.
(16:58):
When you look at our lives from a suitable advantage point,
then it seems our lives are going to be meaningless.
Why would you think this repetitive activity that in the
end e shee is very little or nothing is going
to be the basis of a meaningful life. That, then
is the basic question, what's required for them to be
meaning in life? And dogs differ from us in certain ways,
(17:19):
and I think the fundamental difference is that dogs have
one life and we have two. This results from our
developing a capacity or ability that is present in dogs,
I think only minimally or not at all perhaps, And
this ability is reflection, understood as the ability to think
(17:40):
about yourself, about what you're doing, about why you're doing it,
and your life as sort of a whole. And once
you have this ability and it's I think it's a
characteristically human ability. It's not present in other animals, or
in this way, it's much more present in us than
other animals. With the World Heavyweight Champions of reflect. Once
you have this ability, then your life kind of splits
(18:02):
into two. Right. There's the life that you live in
the standard way, and there is the life that you
think about, that you scrutinize, that you evaluate, that you judge,
that you agonize over and so on. The road less traveled,
for example, is a standard human anxiety. Or I made
this choice? But should I have made this other one?
(18:23):
I don't think dogs do that. You know, I picked
up this stick on the walk? Should I have picked
up that other one? I don't think they do that
kind of thing. So we have two lives because of
this ability to reflect, and the dog just has one.
I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the
dog's going to love its one life more than we
love our two lives.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
So I want to spend a minute on reflection here,
and then I think we should go back to meaning
this ability for reflection. We have Socrates saying, supposedly saying
or coming out of that school of thought. That the
examined life is the only life that's worth living. But
we have another pillar of Western thought that actually argues
(19:22):
kind of the opposite, which is the biblical story of
Adam and Eve and the Fall. And you say in
the book that you find yourself, strangely enough, citing more
with the Adam and Eve view of our ability to
have reflection versus the socrate in view.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yes, it did strike me as ironic. You know, someone
who's spent his life doing philosophy, and here I am saying,
wait a minute. I mean one thing we can take
away from the story of the Fall. You know, when
I start the book with Milton's, Milton's a kind of
Adam and Eve. They become self aware and consequently very
quickly become ashamed. Right, if they were a god, then
(19:59):
it's pretty clear what his view of reflection would be, right,
I mean, this is the whole banishment from the Garden
of Eden, the angel with a flaming sword to make
sure you don't get back in that kind of thing.
So it's clear what his view of reflection would be.
I tend to think of stories like this as attempts
to say something, not describe something. That's literally true, but
to say something that's nevertheless important, Yes, And I think
(20:22):
what's important is that existence is always a game of
swings and roundabouts. What you gain from some things, you
also inevitably lose. So reflection has been great for us,
you know, it's allowed us to do all the things
we've done, you know, dominate the planet, all these sorts
of things, in large part because we are reflective creatures.
(20:45):
But they're also drawbacks, and there are certain things that
we've lost because of this ability to reflect, And that's
what the book is about, I suppose. I mean, you
could see this just from looking at any dog having
a remotely good day. Is they take a sort of joy,
a delight in the marginally positive that seems to be
beyond us. So, for example, I mean every day, at
(21:07):
a certain point in the afternoon, I will go and
pick up my younger son from school and I'll say
the shadow he's not around, so I can say it
now without any repercussion, do you want to come with? Right?
And then he will explode into a sort of paroxysm
of delight, running, jumping on sofas, grabbing his leash and
trying to insert his head through the slipnot and he knows.
(21:30):
He's a smart dog, been doing this for years and years.
He knows nothing much is going to happen. We're going
to get in the car. We're going to drive to
the school. We're going to pick up my son, drive back,
come back in the house. There's no dog parks, there's
no chasing iguanas or any kind of At best, it's
marginally positive getting out of the house and seeing things
as he drives past. This is slightly better, marginally better
(21:51):
than being in the house. But he takes such a
sort of delight in the marginally positive. This is something
that we humans just.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Can't do, no, not very well. As I read your book,
I was thinking a lot about I've done a lot
of training in Zen Buddhism, and if I were to
summarize what Zen is trying to get at, I think,
and certainly what my teacher emphasized was a line that
you said, which is basically not being divided like that
(22:22):
your whole being is pointed in a direction, and more
so that that emerges somewhat naturally, and the Zen ideas
if you achieve enough. I don't know what word we
want to use, insight wisdom that you're now not in
this constant self doubt game, the constant reflecting, weighing everything right,
(22:46):
and your actions emerge out of a place of wholeness
and you engage in them in a wholehearted way, which
ideally points you closer to where a dog is than
where maybe the average anxiety ridden human is. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
No, that's very interesting. I wish I knew more about
tem Buddhism. It does sound like the kind of thing
I wanted to do aug in the book. Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
(23:31):
emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
(23:54):
towards getting back on track. I said that we would
hop back to meaning. And here's where I kind of
want to hop back because this is the phrase that
you used in the book and it was one of
the ones that rang my internal zenal arm, which is
that meaning in life arises when what you are and
what you do coincide. Which is a slightly different way
of saying what I just said. Do you see dogs
(24:17):
pointing a direction for us in how we actually begin
to have who we are and what we do become
wor together or for us to be less divided.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes, there's the optimistic me and the pessimistic me, and
usually the pessimistic me wins. So the pessimistic me says, no,
we can't be dogs, right, There's nothing, there's no possibility.
We're irredeemably banished from the garden right because of our
capacity to reflect. And so the very best we can do,
right is just what's important to you is depending on
(24:53):
what's necessary, and this is kind of dependent on our
index to certain things happening in your life, depending on
where you are are India life, you know, but there
are certain sorts of moments where you can just incorporate
a little bit of dog India life. Here's one example.
Again it's part of the marginal positivity theme, but it's
(25:13):
it's slightly more grim than the other one. So back
in April last year, Shadow and I were out for
a run a few miles from home and he gave
out a loud shriek and dropped of the ground. His
back legs were completely paralyzed. The vet thinks it was
a spinal embolism and a stroke that where a bit
of cartilage from his spine that somehow worked its way
(25:36):
into his blood. The blood supply was cut off to
the spine and as a result, he was completely paralyzed
his back legs and this lasted five to ten minutes.
I'm not sure of the exact time because I was,
you know, panicking. But there's one thing he did when
he was in that state, which I suspect it will
always stick with me, precisely because it's the sort of
thing I need now, and it's when he fell. He
(25:57):
was lying in the sun, right and for a dog
in Miami, you know, you don't want to be lying really,
So what he did he wouldn't let me help at
all because he was very frightened, I think, you know,
but he used his front legs to drag himself into
the shade, about twenty feet into the shade. He did that.
I thought, this is a fantastic lesson, right, because what's
(26:18):
the operating idea. Well, the idea is this is awful, right,
this is absolutely awful what's happened. But at least now,
in this moment, I'm slightly better off than I was
in the moment before, sort of. I was talking about,
you know what people need at different parts of the life.
When you go to a certain age and I'm there
pretty much, you kind of understand your strengths and weaknesses,
(26:40):
and so the overall possible end games start to appear. Right, Oh,
perhaps this will get me, you know, this is more
likely to get me than that. Probably something else might
get me, you know, but it's something. You know, you
start to see the general outline of the end, and
that can be overwhelming. It's a difficult realization. But one
kind of antidote to it is this, well, Okay, let's
(27:02):
try and make each moment just a little bit better
than the one before, and then let the end sort of,
you know, take care of itself eventually. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
I've often said, if there was a God and I
got a moment with God after I got through some
of the biggest questions, or if I had a wish,
I would say, can I just be a dog for
like an hour? I just want to know what is
it like to be a dog? Because they do operate,
it seems in such a very different place than we do,
(27:33):
and yet they completely coexist with us. Every once in
a while, I'm struck by the strangeness of it. I'm like,
this is this is a completely different species? Who is
my best companion? Yeah, it's an unusual thing.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, it certainly is. And I don't know how we
manage it, and I don't know how they manage it. Really,
it all depends on similarity and difference and what's driving everything.
Is it because there's so similar to us that we
can be best friends with them, or is it precisely
because they're different from us that they supply something that's
missing that we can be best friends. So maybe it's
(28:10):
a bit of both. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, I think it probably is a bit of both.
But I do think, you know, pointing to their being
natural philosophers and not being reflective. It's one thing I
can say is that my relationships with my dogs feel
very straightforward. Yeah, you know, I lost my baby about
a year and a half, two years, I don't know.
I think it's actually been just about two years a
(28:32):
little over. And it's interesting, like grieving a dog for
me has been a different experience because it's very straightforward.
It's very sad. There's a lot of grief, but there's
not a lot of complicated feelings around, like did we
say the right things to each other? Should we have
done more of this? You know, it's just simple. But
(28:53):
our human relationships are not that way, even really good
ones are not simple in that way. And so so
I think that's one of the things about dogs that
I love, is that the relationship with them seems very simple.
But you say something in the book early on, and
then you come back to it much later, and I
think it's sort of the core argument ultimately, and you say,
(29:17):
the more love there is in a life, whether through relationships, passions,
or experience, is the more meaning that life contains, And
that that's the language dogs are speaking say more about that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yes, So the book was on one level at least.
It was a sort of extended exploration of the idea
of meaning in life. And the conclusion I arrived at,
spoiler alert, was what meaning is is when happiness irrupts
or is it a direct expression of what you are?
I imagine the case of Sissifus, who was happy because
(29:50):
the gods decided to be a little bit more merciful. Right,
So the rock, the hill all non negotiable. They kept that,
But what they did they made with his head to
make him like doing this. So you love nothing more
than rolling rocks up hills. I don't think that's a
good way of thinking about meaning. And if that's right,
it shows the meaning. It's not simply the same thing
(30:12):
as happiness. So happy sis of Us is also a
deluded dupe or stooge of the gods. And the reason
this is not meaningful is that his happiness is not
an expression of who he is. The gods have messed
around with him, and that's where the happiness is coming from.
It's not an expression of who he is. I argue
(30:32):
in the book that meaning in life exists wherever happiness
is an expression of an individual. So when shadow is
chasing the iguanas along the canal. This is an expression
of what he is. I mean because of his nature,
the generations, the history that have gone into making him.
This happiness he seems to exude when he's doing this
(30:55):
is an expression of who he is. Where who he
is has been determined or shaped or influenced backwards bias history.
Wherever you have this eruption of happiness that stems from
your nature. I think that's what meaning in life is.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Ultimately, you're positing that meaning comes together when both happiness
(31:40):
and that happiness emerging naturally from your nature. Yeah, is together.
To tweeze this apart, you gave the example of happiness
that you think is meaningless, which is the equivalent of
somebody messes with your brain to make you happy. You know,
someone comes into my brain, puts an electrode in that
just keeps hitting the happiness button. And that's not particularly meaningful.
I will be happy. And whether I would choose to
(32:02):
do that or not, I might. I'm not sure on
this question, depending on the day. But it's not meaningful.
But we also see people who appear to be acting
out of their nature, like when I was an addict,
I was on some level acting out of what my
nature was at that moment right now. Again, this would
(32:25):
get into the question of what's my true nature, what's
my condition nature, what's my wounded nature? But I wouldn't
argue in any way, shape or form that that was
a meaningful life. I really think your definition is really interesting.
I often think about meaning in this way. It is
a non intellectual way of doing it, which is that
(32:49):
if you and I were to engage in a debate
right now about whether one dog getting run over by
a car is an important thing, I mean some part
maybe like oh yeah, But then you'd go, but look,
there's billions of dogs on the planet. There's always been
billions of dogs. We've got more dogs than we need. Like,
this is trivial. This is not a big deal in
the grand scheme of things intellectually, and I can't best
(33:12):
that argument. Ultimately, I kind of have to be like, well, yeah,
I guess really it doesn't. But if I walked outside
right now and I saw a dog that had been
hit by a car laying in front of me, you
couldn't talk me out of believing that me taking care
of that dog was the most important thing. And so
I think that's pointing at what you're talking about, where
the meaning is emerging from who I am, not from
(33:36):
my intellect.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Right. I think the problem for we humans, right, is
that there is such a thing as who I am,
as who you are. But it's a lot more slippery,
it's a lot more attenuated than it is in the
case of animals, because we're always these two different things.
And I think you articulated what these are very very nicely. Actually,
on the one hand, where creatures who can take the
big picture, right, you know, and from this perspective the
(34:02):
medieval philosophers used to call it perspective of eternity, subspectia eternatarists.
From this perspective, you know, you and I were just
insignificant extras in this whole cosmic play. You and I
were both sort of unremarkable people, living unremarkable lives, just
like everybody else. And so when we die, well that's
(34:23):
just one death amongst sort of billions, you know, what
does it matter. So that's the view from the outside,
if you like. But the view from the inside was, no,
you know, life matters. We're hubs of meaningfulness, significance, all
these sorts of things, and the case of the dog
that you described, is the difference between taking an outside
view of this is just one more dog. You can
(34:43):
take exactly the same sort.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Of view of your being.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It's just one more totally. But there's a view from
the inside, and then from the inside things matter in
a way they can't matter from the outside. So the
reason we're so confused, I think, is because this was
a point made by the philosopher Thomas and Ahor time ago,
fifty years ago. Now we know both of these views
can't be true, right, either with significant or in not.
(35:08):
We can't be both. So these views can't both be true.
But it seems to us strongly that both of them
are true, and therefore we can't find a way respectable
way of abandoning either one.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
This is another area where Zen is interesting, because Zen
talks a lot about this idea of the relative and
the absolute. The absolute would be sort of that that
big view of everything, right, it's just all dust in
the wind, to quote another thing, right, Yeah, but Zen
would posit there's actually a beauty and a freedom to
be found in that. It also talks about the relative,
(35:43):
which is our day to day lives as we experience
them and live them. And Zen makes the point of
they actually believe they are both true, and they are
both actually different sides of the same coin, and that
to be able to move back and forth be between
them fluidly is an attribute. Yeah, to be able to
(36:05):
take both those perspectives, the big perspective, which is like, well,
you know, we're all going to die and the Earth's
going to get engulfed by the sun at some point.
So literally, how this interview with Mark is going is
completely unimportant, and at the exact same moment, it's important
to me, it's important to you. Hopefully somebody listening it's
important too, And it feels that way. So it seems
(36:27):
like maybe philosophers don't like that kind of answer because
it feels like a cheat.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
I think they would like that kind of answer. It's
finding a way to live. The answer is it's always
difficult to explain, like two sides of the same coin.
But what exactly does that mean? Yet?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah, totally totally.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
So I can see the value of the attempt. Yeah,
this is what the human condition is because we're effective creatures.
Because with such creatures we have these two different views.
They're very difficult to reconcile. But the key to living
is is to try and find reconciling them. Right. Dogs
don't have the problems, They just have one view.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Do you think that reflection has become more ingrained in
us as time has gone on, because certainly we can
look back to you were referencing the medieval period and
we could say that, from what we know, most people
believed a certain set of things and didn't spend a
whole lot of time debating whether those things were true.
(37:26):
They went about trying to live them. But today we
live in a very different world where I would say
that the average person, I'm not gonna say average person.
There are a whole lot of people who don't know
what to believe or what they believe, which opens up
an existential crisis of meaning because I can't say that
life means this because God said it means this, right?
(37:48):
And so have we become more reflective? Have we just
had more ideas dropped into our space? Like how do
you think about that?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm one of those people that I don't really know
what I'm thinking until I write it down. That's why
I became a writer. Basically, I wanted to know what
it is I was thinking, I think the ability to
put things in a stable external form, writing is a
sort of obvious example, expands our capacities to reflect on
(38:17):
ourselves because most obviously we can remember what we were
thinking about ourselves yesterday, and then we can add things
to it, and so on and so on. So I
think probably external systems of information storage, where the information
can be about ourselves as well as other things, enhances
our ability to reflect. So that would be a difference
between us and the Middle Ages, where were people's grasp
(38:39):
of writing was a lot.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Less yeap, So ultimately, I think that you arrived in
a place where you felt that the meaning of life
that dogs arrive at is that love is really the thing.
So share with me a little bit more about coming
to that and how you think about and how you
try and bring that into your own life.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
When I see Shadow chasing the iguanas up and down
the canal, he loves what he's doing in a way
that's very very difficult for me to replicate, to generate
that level of delight. You know, it's something he does
every day routine.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Me.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
That's love. It's a love of what you do when
they abide the love of life. So whenever this kind
of love erupts from you is an expression of what
you are. That I think is where we find meaning
in life, and that's ultimately the connection between meaning and love.
It doesn't necessarily mean love of others. That's silly part
of it, but it's the love of life. With life
(39:40):
is a series of things you do.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created this Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(40:02):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
holds you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control
and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. Having
(40:27):
that realization and seeing that in shadow, how have you
found ways to bring that into your life? I mean again,
knowing you're not going to be shadow right, what sort
of one thing you do that helps you get closer
to that.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
I try to find periods of time in any any week, say,
where I will find things that I love doing and
do just because I love doing them. Because the guiding
thought is that if you think of work right as
an activity that you do for something else, you work
because you get you want to get paid, So that's
(41:01):
an activity that has an external reward. I think what
dogs are really really good at is picking up on
the things that have internal rewards, where the reward is
the activity itself, and the way we live many of us,
our lives are kind of outposts of our work. Our
lives are dominated by activity where we're doing something in
order to get something else. So I think that probably
(41:21):
one of the keys to a happy life, and this
is something I've learned from dogs over the years, is
to try and find ways. What we're talking about is
playing way right, where plays is activity whose reward is
internal to the activity itself. The more you can bring
little bits of this into your life, the less your
life becomes dominated by work, I think probably the happier
(41:45):
and more meaningful your life will be.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Or to the extent that you can internalize what you're
doing for work and do it out of a different place.
That's kind of the ultimate, right, And again, a lot
of people don't have that luxury. I think it is
a luxury. I think there are always ways to imbue
what we do with a slightly different spirit. Back to Zen, right.
One of the things we do in Zen is called
(42:08):
work practice, where you do something like washing the dishes
or sweeping the floor, but you try and do it
with single pointed attention. And those things actually can go
from being rote and tedious to kind of enjoyable when
you orient that way.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Yeah, and put it in the terms I sort of
defined then that what you're doing is converting what ordinarily
would be work into play. Yes, that's I think what
we should try and do.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Mark, that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I really
enjoyed your book, and we'll have links in the show
notes to where listeners can get it. And thank you
for joining us.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Thank you, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much
for inviting me.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it. With a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm
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and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(43:08):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
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at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one you Feed community.
I don't think dogs do that. You know, I picked
up this stick on the wool. Should I have picked
up that other one? I don't think they do that
kind of thing. So we have two lives because of
this ability to reflect, and the dog just has one.
I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the
dog's going to love its one life more than we
love our two lives.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(00:47):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
If you know me, you know that I love dogs.
In many ways, it seems that the secret to a
good life might be something that our dogs already know.
Today we're talking with philosopher and author Mark Rowlands, whose
book The Word of Dog does something remarkable. It takes
some of life's biggest, weightiest questions, like what is meaning?
(01:31):
How should we live, and explores them through the lens
of our four legged companions. For me, this conversation hit
right at the heart of When You Feed sweet Spot.
It's about philosophy, it's about dogs, and it's about the
age old question of how to live a good life.
That's a phrase I first uttered in this show's intro
over a decade ago, and one I've been chasing ever since.
(01:54):
Mark argues that reflection, the very thing that makes us
human is both our greatest strength and our biggest trap.
We talked about why meaning in life matters more than
the meaning of life, and how dogs, those blissfully unaware,
joy chasing creatures, might just be the natural philosophers we
all need. By the end of this episode, you might
(02:16):
just see your dog as more than a best friend,
but as a mentor him. Eric Zimmer and this is
the one you feed. Hi, Mark, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Thanks Eric, I'm delighted to be Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
I'm excited to talk to you. And I saw the
title of your latest book, which is called The Word
of Dog, What our canine companions can teach us about
living a good life. I knew I wanted to talk
to you right away because A we love dogs. B.
The book has some philosophy which we like. And when
I recorded the intro to this show got eleven and
a half years ago at this point, I actually used
(02:49):
that phrase in it, how to live a good life?
So you sort of just hit the absolute ven diagram
for one you feed guests. And I really enjoyed the book,
which we're going to get to in a second. But
before we start, we'll start like we always do with
the parable. In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking
with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
(03:11):
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second.
They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
(03:32):
that param means to you in your life and in
the work that you do.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
What's really interesting about that parable is, and this is
the philosophy me now coming out, So I apologize for that.
Who is the feeder? So the feeder is the one
who chooses which wolf to feed. But then the question is, well,
why would he or she choose one wolf rather than
the other. If they choose the bad wolf, then it
seems they're already in some way aligned with that wolf.
(03:57):
If they choose the good wolf, then they're already in
some way aligned with that wolf. So in that sense,
the feeder collapses into the wolf because the feeder is
already aligned with one of the wolves, and so there
is no feeder independently of the wolves.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
It's a very interesting idea. I think we can jump
off and sort of talk from there. Most of us, though,
we'll have the experience of we're at a decision point
or a choice point of some sort, and we recognize
these two things. Right. It could be the old classic
Devil and Angel on your shoulder or whatever it is,
but this feeling of being divided seems very common to
(04:37):
being human. So talk to me about alignment in that sense, the.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Feeling of being divided. I mean, I think the crucial
question is how much significance do you a lot to
that feeling? Does it show that your choice is a
free one? You exist independently of the choices. You can
choose the good wolf, you can choose the bad wolf,
or your choice is already made by who and what
you are.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
That's interesting. In another of your books, it might have
been The Philosopher and the Wolf, you talk about memory,
and you say that there's a common way of thinking
of memory, as in what we actually remember, and you
say that these are not really the key. There's a
deeper and more I'm just going to read what you said,
a deeper and more important way of remembering a form
(05:22):
of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with
the name. This is a memory of a past that
has written itself on you, in your character and in
the life which you bring this character to bear. So
that's what you're talking about here. Right to what degree
in the moment we think we're making a choice, How
free is that choice? Because it is certainly influenced by
and conditioned by everything that's come before.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah, that's right, I mean a memory. I mean, don't
get me started on memory. Actually, my next book is
on memory book. So memory is fascinating a much, much
stranger than we have a thought. In the context of
this parable though, I think the question is to what
extent are we define by choices versus do we exist
independently of our choices? So the power will suppose is
(06:06):
that there's a person who can choose one or the
other wolf. If that's right, then it seems we would
have to exist prior to and independently of our choices.
We exist, and then we make the choices. Now, the
alternate view is, well, we're made up, we are constituted
by our choices. There's no real choice in that second sense.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
I suspect is there a middle ground though, at least
it seems to me. And I don't want to turn
this into a discussion of free will, right, but a
middle ground seems to me to be absolutely I am
deeply influenced by my past, by my memories, by my conditioning.
They actually very much constrain the choices that are available
(06:48):
to me actually in the physical world, based on what's
happened before, but also inside of me to a certain degree.
I talk about this a lot, or I think about
this a lot. Becustomer recovering drug add and the discussion
about this seems to bifiur kate into a couple of camps.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Also.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
One is the addict has no choice, they are completely
in the grips of this thing. The other is this
is all just a choice. The addict should just stop
doing this. Right And for me, I found that a
middle ground is what allows me to function, right that
I can say, well, yes I am you know, at
the moment, many many years away from it. So now
(07:26):
my level of choice is completely different to what I
had then. So I seem to have had less choice,
but there was still some choice.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
It certainly seems that way. It's a very strange view.
You know that the in fact choice is an illusion.
There's no such thing. I don't know. I really don't know.
It's a tricky question, and it depends on what we
mean by choices. The underlying idea, maybe is that there's
a difference between you know, your past fixing what you do,
when your past influencing what you do. Yes, yes, distinction.
(07:57):
So then the question is well, how do we understand
the fluencing and is there a way of understanding it?
Because the worry you write is always, well, okay, on
the one hand, you've got your past fixes what you do,
It determines what you do, is you have no choice.
The other view is, oh no, the past just influences
what you do. But what does influence mean? Because what
(08:17):
we don't want right is fully influenced simply to mean random? Okay.
Some people think, for example, that we're free to the
extent that our actions are not caused by anything. Now
I think that's a very strange and troubling view because
I mean, imagine what it would be like, Okay, for
your actions not to be caused by anything. You just
simply find yourself doing something, right, So the actions have
(08:40):
to come from you to be free in some sense.
Then the worry is, well, if that's right, how do
we understand what it means for an action to come
from you without you determining that action? Because if the
actions simply emanate from you in the sense that what
you are who you are makes those actions inevitable, then
(09:00):
there's no freedom there either. Yeah, So we need some
kind of middle ground between what you are who you are,
making you act, determining your actions. That's the idea, But
we need to understand what influence means without appealing to randomness.
That isn't going to work, right. It's one of the
hardest problems of philosophy.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
I think it is. I mean, this is how I
think about it. And again, I'm a dabbler in philosophy,
and I also recognize that my arguments, ultimately for me,
end up trying to be what's useful in living a life,
not what's technically theoretically true.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Yeah, but I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Think it's random. But I also don't think you can
unwind it enough to really be clear. So for example,
I could say, when I'm around men of you know,
my father's age, and they look a little bit angry,
I get really afraid, right, And I can make a
story that says that's because my dad was angry when
(09:55):
I was a kid, And there's probably some truth in that,
but there's probably a whole lot el going on in
there that I just like, to your point, memories that
I can't even recall. I don't know what things shaped
me in what way, because I think everything is doing
a very subtle shaping. So I don't think it's exactly random,
But I also don't think you can solve the equation
(10:15):
backwards and actually sort out all the variables completely.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah, well, I mean with memory. I mean, since I
wrote that passage that you quoted, I discovered that i'd
been anticipated by the German speaking poet Rilka Rainer Maria Rilka,
who had this fantastic passage in a book called The
Notebooks of Malde Laureate's brig It was his only excursion
into the art form of a novel. He was a poet, right,
(10:41):
and he talks about the most important memories are the
ones you have to have the patience to forget them.
Once you have the patients to forget them, then eventually
they'll return, but their return in a different form. They
won't return as memories, they'll return as something else. So
he talked about memories being glance and gesture of blood,
(11:02):
not to be distinguished from who we are. I think
there's something deeply right about that. Memories of the standard sort,
so called their pisodic memories. So I remember this, I
remember doing this, I remember doing that. They're just the
sort of tip of an iceberg and a far more
significant way we'll link to our past is by way
of things that used to be memories but have now
(11:24):
come back in the different in a different form. So moods,
for example, emotions you're not quite sure where they're coming from.
They're coming from somewhere. They're coming from memories that you
once had, but they become something else. I call them
rilken memories, but it's not clear that they're really memories.
We could think of them as post memories, if you like.
That's the thing. It's the most significant link to the past. Now,
(11:46):
where that leaves us with a question of free will
is again just another very tricky question. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I'm going to pivot us towards your book, and we've
been doing some philosophizing here to start this episode off.
And one of the core ideas in the book is
that dogs are natural philosophers. Talk to me about what
you mean by that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Well, the claim that dogs and natural phosphus. It was
originally made by Socrates, the ancient Greek phiosph but he
was joking. He didn't take it seriously. Basically, it was
a bad pun on his part. But dogs liking what
they know and not liking what they don't know. He
wasn't really being serious, but I think there's actually something
to it. It's not entirely clear why that is, but
(12:27):
I expect that the philosophical worries and anxieties are sometimes
a bit like diseases, diseases that we suffer from, and dogs,
being dogs are not human, they don't suffer from the
same diseases as us. The disease model of philosophy is
associated with Ludwig Wiggenstein. So you know, dogs get PAVO.
We don't. We have philosophical worries dogs don't. And so
(12:51):
that was one of the kind of intuitions that drove
the writing of the book. I suppose I was struck
by this initially when everyday Shadow, who's a German, sheper
Shadow and I go for a walk on the canal
that runs behind the house, and in the mornings, lined
up along the bank of the canal will be scores
of iguanas lined up a fairly regular intervals, and only Shadow,
(13:13):
he takes off hundreds of yards north of the iguanas,
just peel off into the water, swim to the other side,
and climb up the other bank and stay there for
the rest of the day. Okay, So the very next morning, right,
they're back again and shadows start begins this process of
exiling the iguanas all over again. And it struck me eventually.
(13:35):
I mean it took me a long time, but you know,
wheels turned slowly sometimes, and it struck me eventually. This
was a bit like the myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus
was immortal who offended the gods. The gods punished him
by making him roll a large rock up a hill
for all eternity. When he gets to the top, the
rock slips from his grasp, rolls back down to the bottom,
(13:55):
and he has to start all over again. So the
idea is, if you replace the rock with the igua,
then you've got pretty much the same sort of situation
here now Sisyphus when when Phostop's talk about this myth,
he figures in two ways. The first is as the
epitome of a meaningless existence. So all we god is
just repetitive activity. It aims only at its own repetition.
(14:18):
There's nothing that we're can as success or failure, so
a meaningless existence. But secondly, Sisyphus is also taken as
an allegory for human life. We fight our way to
work in the morning, maybe, and then we spend eight
hours or so in this place where we do various
things with mixed results, probably quite modest results, and results
that will soon be wiped away by times passage. Then
(14:39):
we fight our way home again in the evening, perhaps
at home waiting for us at children perhaps not, you know,
but if there are, then in a few years time
they will have grown up and will probably doing the
same kinds of things that we did. And so every
day in our lives seems like one of Sisyphus's steps
up the hill. We leave it eventually to our children,
but it's the same overall idea stuff cheeriou stuff, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(15:03):
And this is the challenge of Sisvas' life is meaningless,
and our lives are recognizably Sissyphian. But it struck me
that actually, this again was I think probably the most
significant inituation which guided me writing this book at all,
was that Shadow was immune to this problem. This is
probably the most meaningful part of his day. And so
(15:23):
I said, well, I suppose that's right, because this was
just an intuition on my but this is the most
part of his day. How would things have to be
in order for that to be true? And this basically
started the various themes I talked about in the book.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Yeah, it's a fascinating way of looking at things. And
I do think this is a deep philosophical question for
all of us, or a spiritual question some people would
frame it as. But it is in the face of
the fact that pretty much everything we do will be
erased by the sands of time. And you know, how
does anything actually matter within that? And you talk about
(15:58):
Socrates in a second way, and you say, you know,
Socrates supposedly said the unexamined life is not worth living,
and then you sort of challenge that idea by saying, well,
as a dog's life not worth living, and you come
to a very different conclusion.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, yeah, so I suspect that there are certain aspects
of a dog's life that make it just as meaningful
and perhaps more meaningful than our lives. But by meaning,
I mean there's two ways. I think what we're going
to get clear is what this talk of meaning is.
So I mean when people told the meaning in life,
they used to think of some kind of external purpose.
(16:35):
Let's suppose it was supplied by God. God says, right,
you know, this is why I'm creating you humans. This
is what you're here for. That's your purpose. It's not
meaning in that sense right that the book is talking about.
It's what some people call meaning in life rather than
meaning of life. The idea is what's required for you
to experience your life as meaningful? And this is the problems.
(16:58):
When you look at our lives from a suitable advantage point,
then it seems our lives are going to be meaningless.
Why would you think this repetitive activity that in the
end e shee is very little or nothing is going
to be the basis of a meaningful life. That, then
is the basic question, what's required for them to be
meaning in life? And dogs differ from us in certain ways,
(17:19):
and I think the fundamental difference is that dogs have
one life and we have two. This results from our
developing a capacity or ability that is present in dogs,
I think only minimally or not at all perhaps, And
this ability is reflection, understood as the ability to think
(17:40):
about yourself, about what you're doing, about why you're doing it,
and your life as sort of a whole. And once
you have this ability and it's I think it's a
characteristically human ability. It's not present in other animals, or
in this way, it's much more present in us than
other animals. With the World Heavyweight Champions of reflect. Once
you have this ability, then your life kind of splits
(18:02):
into two. Right. There's the life that you live in
the standard way, and there is the life that you
think about, that you scrutinize, that you evaluate, that you judge,
that you agonize over and so on. The road less traveled,
for example, is a standard human anxiety. Or I made
this choice? But should I have made this other one?
(18:23):
I don't think dogs do that. You know, I picked
up this stick on the walk? Should I have picked
up that other one? I don't think they do that
kind of thing. So we have two lives because of
this ability to reflect, and the dog just has one.
I think it's probably more or less inevitable that the
dog's going to love its one life more than we
love our two lives.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
So I want to spend a minute on reflection here,
and then I think we should go back to meaning
this ability for reflection. We have Socrates saying, supposedly saying
or coming out of that school of thought. That the
examined life is the only life that's worth living. But
we have another pillar of Western thought that actually argues
(19:22):
kind of the opposite, which is the biblical story of
Adam and Eve and the Fall. And you say in
the book that you find yourself, strangely enough, citing more
with the Adam and Eve view of our ability to
have reflection versus the socrate in view.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yes, it did strike me as ironic. You know, someone
who's spent his life doing philosophy, and here I am saying,
wait a minute. I mean one thing we can take
away from the story of the Fall. You know, when
I start the book with Milton's, Milton's a kind of
Adam and Eve. They become self aware and consequently very
quickly become ashamed. Right, if they were a god, then
(19:59):
it's pretty clear what his view of reflection would be, right,
I mean, this is the whole banishment from the Garden
of Eden, the angel with a flaming sword to make
sure you don't get back in that kind of thing.
So it's clear what his view of reflection would be.
I tend to think of stories like this as attempts
to say something, not describe something. That's literally true, but
to say something that's nevertheless important, Yes, And I think
(20:22):
what's important is that existence is always a game of
swings and roundabouts. What you gain from some things, you
also inevitably lose. So reflection has been great for us,
you know, it's allowed us to do all the things
we've done, you know, dominate the planet, all these sorts
of things, in large part because we are reflective creatures.
(20:45):
But they're also drawbacks, and there are certain things that
we've lost because of this ability to reflect, And that's
what the book is about, I suppose. I mean, you
could see this just from looking at any dog having
a remotely good day. Is they take a sort of joy,
a delight in the marginally positive that seems to be
beyond us. So, for example, I mean every day, at
(21:07):
a certain point in the afternoon, I will go and
pick up my younger son from school and I'll say
the shadow he's not around, so I can say it
now without any repercussion, do you want to come with? Right?
And then he will explode into a sort of paroxysm
of delight, running, jumping on sofas, grabbing his leash and
trying to insert his head through the slipnot and he knows.
(21:30):
He's a smart dog, been doing this for years and years.
He knows nothing much is going to happen. We're going
to get in the car. We're going to drive to
the school. We're going to pick up my son, drive back,
come back in the house. There's no dog parks, there's
no chasing iguanas or any kind of At best, it's
marginally positive getting out of the house and seeing things
as he drives past. This is slightly better, marginally better
(21:51):
than being in the house. But he takes such a
sort of delight in the marginally positive. This is something
that we humans just.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Can't do, no, not very well. As I read your book,
I was thinking a lot about I've done a lot
of training in Zen Buddhism, and if I were to
summarize what Zen is trying to get at, I think,
and certainly what my teacher emphasized was a line that
you said, which is basically not being divided like that
(22:22):
your whole being is pointed in a direction, and more
so that that emerges somewhat naturally, and the Zen ideas
if you achieve enough. I don't know what word we
want to use, insight wisdom that you're now not in
this constant self doubt game, the constant reflecting, weighing everything right,
(22:46):
and your actions emerge out of a place of wholeness
and you engage in them in a wholehearted way, which
ideally points you closer to where a dog is than
where maybe the average anxiety ridden human is. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
No, that's very interesting. I wish I knew more about
tem Buddhism. It does sound like the kind of thing
I wanted to do aug in the book. Yeah, yep.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
(23:31):
emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
(23:54):
towards getting back on track. I said that we would
hop back to meaning. And here's where I kind of
want to hop back because this is the phrase that
you used in the book and it was one of
the ones that rang my internal zenal arm, which is
that meaning in life arises when what you are and
what you do coincide. Which is a slightly different way
of saying what I just said. Do you see dogs
(24:17):
pointing a direction for us in how we actually begin
to have who we are and what we do become
wor together or for us to be less divided.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yes, there's the optimistic me and the pessimistic me, and
usually the pessimistic me wins. So the pessimistic me says, no,
we can't be dogs, right, There's nothing, there's no possibility.
We're irredeemably banished from the garden right because of our
capacity to reflect. And so the very best we can do,
right is just what's important to you is depending on
(24:53):
what's necessary, and this is kind of dependent on our
index to certain things happening in your life, depending on
where you are are India life, you know, but there
are certain sorts of moments where you can just incorporate
a little bit of dog India life. Here's one example.
Again it's part of the marginal positivity theme, but it's
(25:13):
it's slightly more grim than the other one. So back
in April last year, Shadow and I were out for
a run a few miles from home and he gave
out a loud shriek and dropped of the ground. His
back legs were completely paralyzed. The vet thinks it was
a spinal embolism and a stroke that where a bit
of cartilage from his spine that somehow worked its way
(25:36):
into his blood. The blood supply was cut off to
the spine and as a result, he was completely paralyzed
his back legs and this lasted five to ten minutes.
I'm not sure of the exact time because I was,
you know, panicking. But there's one thing he did when
he was in that state, which I suspect it will
always stick with me, precisely because it's the sort of
thing I need now, and it's when he fell. He
(25:57):
was lying in the sun, right and for a dog
in Miami, you know, you don't want to be lying really,
So what he did he wouldn't let me help at
all because he was very frightened, I think, you know,
but he used his front legs to drag himself into
the shade, about twenty feet into the shade. He did that.
I thought, this is a fantastic lesson, right, because what's
(26:18):
the operating idea. Well, the idea is this is awful, right,
this is absolutely awful what's happened. But at least now,
in this moment, I'm slightly better off than I was
in the moment before, sort of. I was talking about,
you know what people need at different parts of the life.
When you go to a certain age and I'm there
pretty much, you kind of understand your strengths and weaknesses,
(26:40):
and so the overall possible end games start to appear. Right, Oh,
perhaps this will get me, you know, this is more
likely to get me than that. Probably something else might
get me, you know, but it's something. You know, you
start to see the general outline of the end, and
that can be overwhelming. It's a difficult realization. But one
kind of antidote to it is this, well, Okay, let's
(27:02):
try and make each moment just a little bit better
than the one before, and then let the end sort of,
you know, take care of itself eventually. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
I've often said, if there was a God and I
got a moment with God after I got through some
of the biggest questions, or if I had a wish,
I would say, can I just be a dog for
like an hour? I just want to know what is
it like to be a dog? Because they do operate,
it seems in such a very different place than we do,
(27:33):
and yet they completely coexist with us. Every once in
a while, I'm struck by the strangeness of it. I'm like,
this is this is a completely different species? Who is
my best companion? Yeah, it's an unusual thing.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, it certainly is. And I don't know how we
manage it, and I don't know how they manage it. Really,
it all depends on similarity and difference and what's driving everything.
Is it because there's so similar to us that we
can be best friends with them, or is it precisely
because they're different from us that they supply something that's
missing that we can be best friends. So maybe it's
(28:10):
a bit of both. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, I think it probably is a bit of both.
But I do think, you know, pointing to their being
natural philosophers and not being reflective. It's one thing I
can say is that my relationships with my dogs feel
very straightforward. Yeah, you know, I lost my baby about
a year and a half, two years, I don't know.
I think it's actually been just about two years a
(28:32):
little over. And it's interesting, like grieving a dog for
me has been a different experience because it's very straightforward.
It's very sad. There's a lot of grief, but there's
not a lot of complicated feelings around, like did we
say the right things to each other? Should we have
done more of this? You know, it's just simple. But
(28:53):
our human relationships are not that way, even really good
ones are not simple in that way. And so so
I think that's one of the things about dogs that
I love, is that the relationship with them seems very simple.
But you say something in the book early on, and
then you come back to it much later, and I
think it's sort of the core argument ultimately, and you say,
(29:17):
the more love there is in a life, whether through relationships, passions,
or experience, is the more meaning that life contains, And
that that's the language dogs are speaking say more about that.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yes, So the book was on one level at least.
It was a sort of extended exploration of the idea
of meaning in life. And the conclusion I arrived at,
spoiler alert, was what meaning is is when happiness irrupts
or is it a direct expression of what you are?
I imagine the case of Sissifus, who was happy because
(29:50):
the gods decided to be a little bit more merciful. Right,
So the rock, the hill all non negotiable. They kept that,
But what they did they made with his head to
make him like doing this. So you love nothing more
than rolling rocks up hills. I don't think that's a
good way of thinking about meaning. And if that's right,
it shows the meaning. It's not simply the same thing
(30:12):
as happiness. So happy sis of Us is also a
deluded dupe or stooge of the gods. And the reason
this is not meaningful is that his happiness is not
an expression of who he is. The gods have messed
around with him, and that's where the happiness is coming from.
It's not an expression of who he is. I argue
(30:32):
in the book that meaning in life exists wherever happiness
is an expression of an individual. So when shadow is
chasing the iguanas along the canal. This is an expression
of what he is. I mean because of his nature,
the generations, the history that have gone into making him.
This happiness he seems to exude when he's doing this
(30:55):
is an expression of who he is. Where who he
is has been determined or shaped or influenced backwards bias history.
Wherever you have this eruption of happiness that stems from
your nature. I think that's what meaning in life is.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Ultimately, you're positing that meaning comes together when both happiness
(31:40):
and that happiness emerging naturally from your nature. Yeah, is together.
To tweeze this apart, you gave the example of happiness
that you think is meaningless, which is the equivalent of
somebody messes with your brain to make you happy. You know,
someone comes into my brain, puts an electrode in that
just keeps hitting the happiness button. And that's not particularly meaningful.
I will be happy. And whether I would choose to
(32:02):
do that or not, I might. I'm not sure on
this question, depending on the day. But it's not meaningful.
But we also see people who appear to be acting
out of their nature, like when I was an addict,
I was on some level acting out of what my
nature was at that moment right now. Again, this would
(32:25):
get into the question of what's my true nature, what's
my condition nature, what's my wounded nature? But I wouldn't
argue in any way, shape or form that that was
a meaningful life. I really think your definition is really interesting.
I often think about meaning in this way. It is
a non intellectual way of doing it, which is that
(32:49):
if you and I were to engage in a debate
right now about whether one dog getting run over by
a car is an important thing, I mean some part
maybe like oh yeah, But then you'd go, but look,
there's billions of dogs on the planet. There's always been
billions of dogs. We've got more dogs than we need. Like,
this is trivial. This is not a big deal in
the grand scheme of things intellectually, and I can't best
(33:12):
that argument. Ultimately, I kind of have to be like, well, yeah,
I guess really it doesn't. But if I walked outside
right now and I saw a dog that had been
hit by a car laying in front of me, you
couldn't talk me out of believing that me taking care
of that dog was the most important thing. And so
I think that's pointing at what you're talking about, where
the meaning is emerging from who I am, not from
(33:36):
my intellect.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Right. I think the problem for we humans, right, is
that there is such a thing as who I am,
as who you are. But it's a lot more slippery,
it's a lot more attenuated than it is in the
case of animals, because we're always these two different things.
And I think you articulated what these are very very nicely. Actually,
on the one hand, where creatures who can take the
big picture, right, you know, and from this perspective the
(34:02):
medieval philosophers used to call it perspective of eternity, subspectia eternatarists.
From this perspective, you know, you and I were just
insignificant extras in this whole cosmic play. You and I
were both sort of unremarkable people, living unremarkable lives, just
like everybody else. And so when we die, well that's
(34:23):
just one death amongst sort of billions, you know, what
does it matter. So that's the view from the outside,
if you like. But the view from the inside was, no,
you know, life matters. We're hubs of meaningfulness, significance, all
these sorts of things, and the case of the dog
that you described, is the difference between taking an outside
view of this is just one more dog. You can
(34:43):
take exactly the same sort.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Of view of your being.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It's just one more totally. But there's a view from
the inside, and then from the inside things matter in
a way they can't matter from the outside. So the
reason we're so confused, I think, is because this was
a point made by the philosopher Thomas and Ahor time ago,
fifty years ago. Now we know both of these views
can't be true, right, either with significant or in not.
(35:08):
We can't be both. So these views can't both be true.
But it seems to us strongly that both of them
are true, and therefore we can't find a way respectable
way of abandoning either one.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
This is another area where Zen is interesting, because Zen
talks a lot about this idea of the relative and
the absolute. The absolute would be sort of that that
big view of everything, right, it's just all dust in
the wind, to quote another thing, right, Yeah, but Zen
would posit there's actually a beauty and a freedom to
be found in that. It also talks about the relative,
(35:43):
which is our day to day lives as we experience
them and live them. And Zen makes the point of
they actually believe they are both true, and they are
both actually different sides of the same coin, and that
to be able to move back and forth be between
them fluidly is an attribute. Yeah, to be able to
(36:05):
take both those perspectives, the big perspective, which is like, well,
you know, we're all going to die and the Earth's
going to get engulfed by the sun at some point.
So literally, how this interview with Mark is going is
completely unimportant, and at the exact same moment, it's important
to me, it's important to you. Hopefully somebody listening it's
important too, And it feels that way. So it seems
(36:27):
like maybe philosophers don't like that kind of answer because
it feels like a cheat.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
I think they would like that kind of answer. It's
finding a way to live. The answer is it's always
difficult to explain, like two sides of the same coin.
But what exactly does that mean? Yet?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Yeah, totally totally.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
So I can see the value of the attempt. Yeah,
this is what the human condition is because we're effective creatures.
Because with such creatures we have these two different views.
They're very difficult to reconcile. But the key to living
is is to try and find reconciling them. Right. Dogs
don't have the problems, They just have one view.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Do you think that reflection has become more ingrained in
us as time has gone on, because certainly we can
look back to you were referencing the medieval period and
we could say that, from what we know, most people
believed a certain set of things and didn't spend a
whole lot of time debating whether those things were true.
(37:26):
They went about trying to live them. But today we
live in a very different world where I would say
that the average person, I'm not gonna say average person.
There are a whole lot of people who don't know
what to believe or what they believe, which opens up
an existential crisis of meaning because I can't say that
life means this because God said it means this, right?
(37:48):
And so have we become more reflective? Have we just
had more ideas dropped into our space? Like how do
you think about that?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm one of those people that I don't really know
what I'm thinking until I write it down. That's why
I became a writer. Basically, I wanted to know what
it is I was thinking, I think the ability to
put things in a stable external form, writing is a
sort of obvious example, expands our capacities to reflect on
(38:17):
ourselves because most obviously we can remember what we were
thinking about ourselves yesterday, and then we can add things
to it, and so on and so on. So I
think probably external systems of information storage, where the information
can be about ourselves as well as other things, enhances
our ability to reflect. So that would be a difference
between us and the Middle Ages, where were people's grasp
(38:39):
of writing was a lot.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Less yeap, So ultimately, I think that you arrived in
a place where you felt that the meaning of life
that dogs arrive at is that love is really the thing.
So share with me a little bit more about coming
to that and how you think about and how you
try and bring that into your own life.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
When I see Shadow chasing the iguanas up and down
the canal, he loves what he's doing in a way
that's very very difficult for me to replicate, to generate
that level of delight. You know, it's something he does
every day routine.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Me.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
That's love. It's a love of what you do when
they abide the love of life. So whenever this kind
of love erupts from you is an expression of what
you are. That I think is where we find meaning
in life, and that's ultimately the connection between meaning and love.
It doesn't necessarily mean love of others. That's silly part
of it, but it's the love of life. With life
(39:40):
is a series of things you do.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created this Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
(40:02):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
holds you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through them. If you're ready to take back control
and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. Having
(40:27):
that realization and seeing that in shadow, how have you
found ways to bring that into your life? I mean again,
knowing you're not going to be shadow right, what sort
of one thing you do that helps you get closer
to that.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
I try to find periods of time in any any week, say,
where I will find things that I love doing and
do just because I love doing them. Because the guiding
thought is that if you think of work right as
an activity that you do for something else, you work
because you get you want to get paid, So that's
(41:01):
an activity that has an external reward. I think what
dogs are really really good at is picking up on
the things that have internal rewards, where the reward is
the activity itself, and the way we live many of us,
our lives are kind of outposts of our work. Our
lives are dominated by activity where we're doing something in
order to get something else. So I think that probably
(41:21):
one of the keys to a happy life, and this
is something I've learned from dogs over the years, is
to try and find ways. What we're talking about is
playing way right, where plays is activity whose reward is
internal to the activity itself. The more you can bring
little bits of this into your life, the less your
life becomes dominated by work, I think probably the happier
(41:45):
and more meaningful your life will be.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Or to the extent that you can internalize what you're
doing for work and do it out of a different place.
That's kind of the ultimate, right, And again, a lot
of people don't have that luxury. I think it is
a luxury. I think there are always ways to imbue
what we do with a slightly different spirit. Back to Zen, right.
One of the things we do in Zen is called
(42:08):
work practice, where you do something like washing the dishes
or sweeping the floor, but you try and do it
with single pointed attention. And those things actually can go
from being rote and tedious to kind of enjoyable when
you orient that way.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Yeah, and put it in the terms I sort of
defined then that what you're doing is converting what ordinarily
would be work into play. Yes, that's I think what
we should try and do.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Mark, that's a beautiful place to wrap up. I really
enjoyed your book, and we'll have links in the show
notes to where listeners can get it. And thank you
for joining us.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Thank you, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much
for inviting me.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it. With a friend. Sharing
from one person to another is the lifeblood of what
we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm
certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better,
and that's you. Just hit the share button on your
(43:08):
podcast app or send a quick text with the episode
link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means
the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode
at a time. Thank you for being part of the
one you Feed community.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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