I’ve been working on the first essay of my new attempt at philosophy. It’s on the topic of philosophy itself. I’ve been thinking along the lines of philosophy being sensemaking, a more complex form of orientation.
All animals have to do orientation in the physical world as well as their social world. But humans have to do sensemaking because of how complex we’ve made the human world. Then I remembered something I’d read somewhere about dogs and how they orient themselves in the world.
They say that when you take your dog on a walk, you should let them smell things, especially the markings of other dogs. If you don’t do this, your dog can become anxious and stressed.
I think this is because dogs use smell for orientation. It’s like their news network. They want to continuously update their olfactory map of the neighborhood (which is their entire world really). They want to know, which other dogs are there, how stressed or aggressive they are, what’s their sex and if there are any females in heat etc. When they don’t get to smell and explore, they are uncertain about what’s in their world. They lose their orientation and become stressed and anxious.
This got me thinking about how we humans have got a similar attraction to news and how that has been exploited by our entire media infrastructure. This is why people get so invested in watching the news compulsively. They want to keep their map of the world updated because the fear of not knowing what’s happening in the world causes anxiety.
The irony is that watching contemporary news increases, rather than decreases, anxiety. Which probably creates a feedback loop, making people consume more and more of the news.
The inherent negativity bias in news, the skewed incentives of news channels to capture attention for as long as possible so they can sell their ad space to their real customers, and perhaps most importantly, the mixture of local and global news, has created a monster of a system that is doing more harm than good to us.
To understand this, imagine if there was a scent broadcasting device for dogs similar to our television, that released scents 24/7, directly into the home for the dog to smell. And it had a negativity bias and most of the scents were of aggressive alpha dogs and stressed out dogs. And these smells were from all over the world. Can you imagine how stressed your dog would be?
The poor dog would be barking into the night, thinking that all these dangerous dogs and predators were right in its neighborhood. A weaker dog might refuse to leave the house.
This is exactly what humans have done to themselves with news. You might say, “hang on, wait a minute, aren’t we smarter than animals and so know that these threats aren’t outside our door?” Well, we might understand this in our brain but our body doesn’t know the difference. It still reacts like any other animal’s.
Orientation is necessary for the local environment. To be fair, for humans, some orientation in the global world is also needed because of the complicated global society we’ve created. But it is unwise to pay too much attention to events that happen so far away, in terms of geography or power hierarchy, that we can’t do anything about them.
So moral of the post is, don’t watch too much news, and let your dog smell his heart out on walks.
Rudya Aditya 
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