I Worked for The Dogist. This Is What I Learned.

Preface

I should probably start by saying the version of me entering this story is not the same person writing it now.

Back then I just entering my 30s. I was carrying around a camera and an ego disguised as ambition, which, if we’re being honest, is a pretty standard New York starter pack. I thought I was sharper than I was, more talented than I was, more important than I was. I was 30, I truly believed deeply in my heart I was a fully formed seasoned, wise adult. I thought I was smarter than everyone in the room when it came to dogs. Underneath all of it was really just a guy wanting desperately to be taken seriously by people he admired.

Looking back, I was probably still kind of a loser in the most classic creative New York sense of the word. Broke half the time. Walking dogs all day. Taking photos in between walks. Romanticizing struggle because it sounded better than admitting confusion. The kind of guy who mistakes intensity for wisdom because nobody has humbled him properly yet.

I walked into this chapter believing proximity to successful people would somehow accelerate my own identity. Like if I stayed close enough to talent and coolness and relevance, eventually some of it would rub off on me. Which is a pretty humiliating realization to arrive at later in life.

Enough time has passed now that I can look back on the experience without the emotional static that used to surround it. Distance changes memory. It removes some of the raw emotional impurities and leaves behind the essence of what actually mattered.

These articles have also slowly stopped feeling like blog posts to me. They’ve started turning into essays, journals, little fragments of memoirs. Musings from my memory. I think part of why I write them is because I’ve always had this strange need to close the book properly on certain periods of my life before I can fully move on from them. Maybe one day I’ll write about all of this more directly in an actual book. Maybe in that version I’ll be slightly less diplomatic.

Before you butter your popcorn, I’m sorry to disappoint but this piece won’t be “exposing” anybody. It’s just memory. My subjective recollection and interpretation of a strange formative chapter that taught me more about ambition, insecurity, social dynamics, art, loneliness, branding, and human nature than I understood while I was actually living through it.

I also think the internet has become painfully sanitized. Everybody’s terrified of sounding messy or emotional or contradictory. Everything has to flatten into these neat little moral narratives where somebody is entirely right and somebody else is entirely evil. Real life has never worked that way. Most people are contradictory. Most relationships contain admiration and resentment simultaneously. Most experiences live somewhere in the gray.

That’s the kind of writing I’m interested in. Not public relations disguised as vulnerability. Something a little more human than that. People should be allowed to broadcast their thoughts into the void every now and again without immediately being told they’re “doing too much.”

Somebody once commented that my articles were too long, which I found funny considering human beings have spent thousands of years writing books, journals, memoirs, letters, poetry, philosophy, scripture, drunken ramblings, and carving messages into walls trying to understand themselves and each other.

Hell, there’s still graffiti with profanity etched in Latin into the Roman Colosseum. There are cave paintings tens of thousands of years old depicting people doing things that would probably still get flagged on Instagram today. So yeah, I think I’ve earned the right to speak my truth.

I’ve always been a raw person. Not reckless. Not somebody who explodes on people publicly for sport. But I do believe in speaking honestly about your experiences, contradictions, failures, insecurities, resentments, and growth. The internet now feels overly optimized. Too curated. Too PR trained. Everybody’s terrified of sounding human.

That’s not the kind of writer I want to become.

Before Any of This Happened

There’s something funny about the dog world when you’ve been in it long enough.

Funny in the same way restaurants are funny. Or nightlife. Or fashion.

Any industry built around passion eventually fills itself with obsessives, eccentrics, emotionally damaged people, saviors, narcissists, burnout cases, nepo babies cosplaying bohemian struggle, and the occasional genuinely beautiful human somehow holding the whole crooked ecosystem together with coffee, anxiety, and sweatpants covered in dog fur. And then there are the dogs, who are usually the least complicated part of the entire equation. They ground us, humble us and love us through it all, regardless of who we are.

By the time The Dogist entered my life, I had already spent years walking dogs through Hoboken in every imaginable condition. Summer heat bouncing off concrete like invisible microwaves. Rainstorms soaking through sneakers before noon. Tiny railroad apartments where three roommates and an anxious pitbull mix somehow coexisted in a state of chaotic harmony. Wealthy apartments with kitchens larger than my childhood home.

You learn a lot walking dogs for a living. Mostly about people.

You learn who’s lonely. Who’s pretending not to be lonely. Which couples are hanging on by a thread. Which people use dogs as emotional flotation devices. Which people genuinely love animals and which people mostly enjoy the aesthetic of being perceived as the kind of person who loves animals.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started carrying a camera around with me.

At first it was casual. Just dogs I thought looked interesting. Funny little moments. A boxer staring at a pigeon like he owed him money. A bulldog outside a bodega looking like a retired mobster who’d seen too much. Then photography quietly became something else. A way of processing the world. A way of noticing things. It was just for fun at first.

Slowly, the compliments started. Then the paid shoots started. I’d spend the mornings and afternoons dog walking, then rush off to photograph clients all over New Jersey and New York in the evenings with camera batteries dying in my bag and dog hair still stuck to my clothes. Somewhere along the line, without fully realizing it, I had actually gotten good at dog photography.

Around that same period, I became obsessed with The Dogist. The account hit me differently than most dog content online. It didn’t feel overly sentimental or emotionally manipulative. It felt like New York. Funny. Stylish. Slightly lonely. Slightly guarded. Full of strange characters. As I got deeper into photography, I found myself constantly tweaking my editing style and trying to emulate parts of that visual language, especially the darker moodier look I was gravitating toward at the time.

So when I saw a post around 2021 saying they were looking for an assistant photographer, I applied.

After multiple interviews, test assignments, anxiety, and basically living on a prayer, I got the job.

At the time, it genuinely felt like my life was changing. Like maybe all the years of wandering around the city with a camera hanging off my shoulder had finally started leading somewhere.

The Early Excitement

I remember one of my earlier assignments was photographing dogs at Animal Haven. They had coordinated with the rescue for me to come by, but beyond that I was mostly figuring things out on the fly. My camera bag strap had snapped earlier that day, so I was awkwardly carrying everything through Manhattan in this oversized boxy North Face backpack that barely fit the gear properly. By the time I got downtown, I was already running late, sweaty, and completely soaked through this thick cotton Dogist shirt I was trying very hard not to ruin.

I remember stopping to grab a cold brew because I was dehydrated and nervous at the same time, standing there holding camera gear and iced coffee thinking I probably looked significantly less professional than I had imagined in my head when I accepted the job.

That was kind of the emotional tone of that entire period of my life honestly. Trying very hard to appear calmer, cooler, more established, and more confident than I actually felt internally.

I wanted badly to impress everybody around me. Not just because I admired the brand, but because I admired what it represented creatively. I thought I was finally stepping into the world I had wanted access to for years.

A Deep Dive Into The Dog World

One of the things I genuinely gained from the experience was access to parts of the dog world I probably never would’ve seen otherwise.

Before all this, I thought I already had a pretty good understanding of passionate dog people. I had spent years around wealthy owners, anxious owners, helicopter owners, people who treated dogs like children, people who treated dogs better than their actual children.

But working alongside larger organizations and niche corners of the industry taught me there were levels to it I hadn’t even considered.

I remember photographing cadaver dogs for a fundraising campaign. Actual search dogs trained to help locate missing people and bodies. One of the handlers was this older guy, probably late fifties, incredibly intense. The kind of person who seemed permanently locked into mission mode even while casually standing still. He had this entire elaborate setup of gear and equipment, and watching him work alongside his Smooth Collie was honestly fascinating.

The dog barely needed commands. It was like watching two symbiotic creatures speaking telepathically. At the same time, I’d be lying if I said the guy didn’t intimidate me a little. He had that old school grizzled, hard nosed energy where you could tell he genuinely did not care whether he came across as warm or socially pleasant. During the shoot he was stern, blunt, hyper focused, and completely uninterested in softening himself for anybody’s comfort. And honestly, part of me respected that too. So unbothered. Love it.

Another time I worked with a rescue organization where the shelter coordinator was extremely protective over how the dogs were portrayed. She wanted to review photos afterward, carefully monitoring which images represented the organization publicly. At first I found it slightly controlling, but eventually I understood the pressure she was under. Some of the dogs were in heartbreaking condition and she was trying to balance honesty with protecting the image and survival of the shelter itself.

That was another thing I started understanding more deeply during this period: the dog world runs almost entirely on emotion. Sympathy. Trust. Perception. Hope.

One bad image can affect donations. One viral moment can change an organization overnight. I understood and respected it.

I also remember visiting a water therapy facility for dogs where the therapist running it treated every single animal with an almost unbelievable level of care. There were red light treatments, deep tissue massages, carefully monitored water sessions, tiny behavioral adjustments depending on each dog’s anxiety level or physical condition.

And watching that honestly moved me a little.

Because beneath all the branding and influencer culture and weird industry politics, there were still people quietly dedicating enormous portions of their lives to helping animals rehabilitate, feel safe and be comfortable. That part was real. And I’m grateful I got to see it.

At the same time, one of the first things that surprised me was how exhausting influencer culture actually is behind the scenes.

From the outside, people imagine somebody casually wandering around Manhattan discovering beautiful dogs while jazz music plays softly in the background. The reality felt closer to a traveling production company held together by logistics, caffeine, deadlines, sponsorships, anxious emails, weather problems, late arrivals, difficult rescue coordinators, stressed dog owners, and dogs refusing to cooperate at the exact wrong moment.

The first major crack in my perception came from something surprisingly simple: rejection.

I remember walking around with Elias while he approached strangers asking to photograph their dogs, and honestly, a surprising number of people just said no. Flat out no. Sometimes politely. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes without even stopping.

And weirdly enough, I found that comforting.

Online, millions of followers create the illusion that certain people move through the world untouched by normal human friction. But standing there watching strangers brush off somebody internet-famous reminded me that social media scale doesn’t magically exempt people from ordinary human interactions.

It also became obvious very quickly how much invisible labor existed behind the feed. Endless emails. Brand negotiations. Deliverables. Companies wanting access to the audience while suddenly becoming confused the moment money entered the conversation. Brands love the idea of art until they’re asked to pay what sustaining it actually costs.

I remember one day shooting with Elias for several hours and then heading back to his apartment afterward. In my head, because of the scale of the brand and the follower count, I had subconsciously imagined something larger than life.

The apartment was tiny. Not quirky tiny. Actually tiny. And I remember standing there thinking: this is a person with millions of followers.

That moment weirdly humanized the entire influencer world for me. Social media compresses reality into perception. Followers create psychological scale that doesn’t necessarily exist physically. Sometimes it’s still just somebody editing content at two in the morning inside a shoebox Manhattan apartment trying to keep the machine fed.

And honestly, there was something quietly sad about that realization too.

The Atmosphere

The actual work environment felt harder to settle into than I expected.

To be fair, I probably wasn’t the easiest person to integrate either. I came into the environment carrying a lot of ambition, insecurity, and quiet desperation to prove I belonged there. I could genuinely be a prick sometimes but I put my best foot forward for this position. I was on my best behavior. Hyper focused and hyper vigilant. Still, underneath almost everything was tension. Not explosive tension. Not screaming matches. The kind of tension that exists in environments where everybody quietly understands one person’s opinion controls the emotional temperature of the room.

Elias had a very specific vision for what he wanted, not just photographically, but emotionally and socially too. There was a particular atmosphere surrounding the brand, and everybody seemed highly aware of protecting it at all times. You could feel it during shoots, meetings, silences. People didn’t seem afraid of him exactly. More afraid of shifting the energy in the wrong direction.

Honestly, after a while, the closest comparison I could think of was something out of Star Wars. Like Imperial officers carefully trying not to upset Darth Vader. Not because anybody was outwardly cruel or cartoonishly evil. It was more the gravitational pull of one central figure whose reactions subtly shifted the emotional weather around everybody else.

And when your career revolves around branding, audience perception, and emotional atmosphere long enough, eventually those dynamics start bleeding into real life too.

The Odd Dog Out

The team already had an established chemistry before I arrived. Everybody already understood each other socially. There was already a rhythm to the environment. I was stepping into something that already existed before me.

And I was also the only person of color there at the time.

Nothing openly racist or hostile ever happened. That’s part of what made the experience difficult to fully interpret while I was inside it. The tension mostly existed in implication. Small moments. Accumulation.

Nobody explicitly says “you’re not welcome here.” Human beings usually communicate that far more subtly than that.

I remember joining the Slack channel early on and there being constant conversation for a while. Then eventually it became almost silent, or at least silent where I could see it. And once certain thoughts enter your head, they start infecting everything else. You start noticing who already seems to have context before meetings. You start wondering whether conversations are happening elsewhere. You start wondering whether you’re integrating socially or just orbiting something from the outside.

I probably analyzed the Slack thing harder than most people analyze geopolitical conflicts. That’s how badly I wanted to belong there.

I remember being given a company email address and adding it to my Instagram bio because, to me, that felt symbolic. Like I had officially become part of something meaningful. One day I was told to remove it by one of the senior team members.

Again, not some catastrophic offense. But little moments like that slowly contributed to this strange feeling of being outside of the operation rather than fully inside it. Like a ghost standing just outside the frame of something he was actively helping create.

Same thing with merchandise. The first drop of hoodies and shirts was gifted to me. Later releases, if I wanted to publicly wear or represent the brand, I had to buy things myself.

I remember once making a creative suggestion during a shoot and watching somebody visibly roll their eyes. None of these moments individually ruined my life obviously. Yet they made me uneasy creatively and professionally.

I also remember being assigned a shoot all the way out on Long Island. Sitting on the train with camera gear in my lap, staring out the window, already feeling vaguely irritated without fully understanding why. When I finally arrived, the woman we were photographing looked confused and asked why we had been sent so far when she lived near Central Park and the entire thing easily could’ve been done there instead. I wondered the same thing.

I remember being told that what I was photographing for Instagram and the social channels was essentially visual ghostwriting. The photos lived under the brand, not under me. And honestly, while I was genuinely grateful just to be part of the team, there were definitely moments where it quietly broke my heart a little. I had spent years teaching myself photography, walking dogs all day with a camera strap hanging around my neck so much that I got a tan line. I was out here trying to build some kind of creative identity for myself, and now images I had taken were reaching huge audiences without my name ever really attached to them.

I still took the opportunity incredibly seriously. I was the only other photographer who shot for the brand, and even though I never went around bragging about it publicly, it became this quiet little badge of honor for me during a pretty dark and chaotic period of my life.

I also think part of me wanted to contribute more than just photos. I was the only team member actively working in dog care every single day for over a decade. I understood dog behavior, dog breeds, all the tiny eccentricities and emotional dynamics that exist between people and animals in New York.

But at the same time, I was never really publicly introduced to the audience the way the other team members were, which sometimes left me feeling strangely invisible despite how emotionally invested I was in the work itself.

I even got to photograph some of my own Hoboken dog walking clients, and a few of those photos made it onto The Dogist Instagram feed, which honestly still makes me proud when I think about it.

Same thing when filming video content. I remember being told not to speak while recording because they didn’t want my voice picked up in the background. So there I’d be filming dogs with my phone that I had just photographed. My iPhone would be held up in front of me, while I was completely quiet while every instinct in my body was telling me to make noises at them, praise them, slip into that ridiculous puppy-talk voice every dog person naturally develops after enough years around animals. A dog would look up at me wagging its tail waiting for energy back, and I’d just silently nod behind the phone while camera shutters, traffic noise, and city sounds filled the space instead. The whole thing felt strangely unnatural, almost like asking a dog not to bark. My voice muted, both in the literal and figurative sense.

Before that experience, I never really thought much about why the dog influencer space seemed to skew so heavily female. Or why there were so few Hispanic or POC creators floating around those circles in general. But after spending enough time inside that ecosystem certain things started making a little more sense.

Looking back, I think part of why certain moments affected me as much as they did had very little to do with the actual workplace itself and a lot to do with old insecurities I probably never fully outgrew. The whole experience sometimes reminded me of being a nervous freshman around cool seniors who occasionally make you feel included just enough to keep hoping you belong there. You’re invited close enough to glimpse the world, but never quite close enough to fully relax inside it.

I remember seeing photos later of team retreats, horseback riding trips, camp weekends, events, galas, bonding experiences I hadn’t even known were happening, and it triggered something weirdly juvenile inside me.

It reminded me of being an overweight kid showing up to the first day of school in crisp, spotless white Nike Air Forces thinking maybe this would finally be the year things felt different. Maybe this would be the year I’d get picked sooner during basketball. Maybe this would be the year I’d stop being excluded.

And then gym class starts and somehow you’re still the last kid standing there waiting to be chosen while pretending not to care.

Isabel

My dynamic with Isabel probably deserves its own section because, whether intentionally or unintentionally, she became the person I most associated with the emotional atmosphere of the environment overall.

Besides Elias, it was a very female centric environment that I was stepping into. Everybody already seemed emotionally synchronized in a way I didn’t fully understand yet. Women working in creative industries also tend to be incredibly socially observant. They pick up on insecurity, awkwardness, confidence shifts, tone, energy, social calibration.

Walking into that environment as the only person of color, I constantly felt hyperaware of myself. Not unsafe. Not attacked. Just observed.

And with Isabel specifically, I never fully felt embraced. Not in some dramatic movie scene kind of way. It was subtler than that. More like a coolness. A distance. The feeling of being evaluated more than welcomed.

And honestly, that bothered me more than I probably wanted to admit at the time because I genuinely looked up to her. In my head, she was almost like this niche internet celebrity connected to a world I deeply admired creatively. So never really feeling accepted by her really hurt more than it probably should have.

When you’re younger, you internalize that stuff. You start wondering what it is about you that creates distance with certain people. Was I too awkward? Too eager? Too intense? Did I make her uncomfortable somehow? I genuinely don’t know.

Part of me even wondered whether she viewed me competitively in some strange way, like I was trying to carve out space for myself inside a world she already helped build. Whether that was true or just insecurity talking, I’ll probably never know.

But I also think age teaches you eventually that people not fully connecting with you is often more about where they are internally than some objective measurement of your worth.

Sometimes personalities don’t mesh. Sometimes energies don’t align. Sometimes the people you admire most simply never see you the way you hoped they would.

At the same time, I learned a tremendous amount simply by observing her professionally. She clearly understood branding, audience psychology, pacing, emotional tone, and online engagement at a very high level. She was talented. She is talented.

Working around social media at that level also taught me something bigger. The people you follow online are almost never exactly who they appear to be. Not because they’re necessarily being disingenuous, but because no human being exists as one uniform flavor of a person.

We all have different versions of ourselves depending on who we’re around, what we’re protecting, and what role we’re playing. Social media just compresses all that complexity into a digestible avatar.

Elias

People always ask me what Elias was like.

I don’t have much to say. He kept his distance. He remained mysterious. I think that was very intentional.

He’s like some rare elusive endangered species. The kind people spend years trying to track through dense wilderness just to catch a glimpse of before it disappears back into the fog again. You can get close enough to photograph him, close enough to study him for a while, close enough to imagine what it might be like to truly know him, but never quite close enough to fully get within arm’s length of him as a person.

That’s how certain public figures are once mythology starts forming around them. They can be physically close to you while remaining emotionally distant.

What made Elias compelling creatively was that he genuinely seemed to notice things other people overlooked. Not just dogs, but emotional texture. He understood character. He understood framing. He understood restraint. He is genuinely a genius, not just in a superficial influencer way. Very cerebral, quietly intense.

Ironically, one of the biggest things he taught me photographically happened in maybe in ten minutes one afternoon.

For years before meeting him, I had been obsessing over camera settings trying to manually control every little variable like some anxious film student trying to prove he deserved to call himself a photographer. And I remember him basically simplifying the entire thing for me almost instantly. Auto ISO. Fixed shutter speed. Focus on the aperture, the composition. Basically letting the camera handle most of the technical noise so your brain could focus on actually seeing.

It sounds stupidly simple now.

But honestly, it felt like a microcosm of my entire experience working there and maybe even my personality at the time. I had been overthinking everything. Photography. Creativity. Social dynamics. My future. My identity. My place in the room.

Meanwhile the answer was often just: slow down and see what’s already in front of you.

He also had a very dry sense of humor people outside the inner orbit of the brand probably wouldn’t expect. Not loud. Not performative. More subtle. Occasionally sarcastic in a way that could either make you feel included or slightly nervous depending on the situation. One time I came over to his apartment and he had gotten us both iced coffees. I absentmindedly set mine down on this expensive wooden table and he suddenly got a little upset because apparently Isabel had once left a condensation ring on it permanently with a cold drink. At first I thought he was joking because of how monotone he delivered it, but then I realized he was completely serious and found myself awkwardly wiping condensation off the cup and searching for a coaster as quickly as possible. Moments like that happened occasionally where I genuinely couldn’t fully tell how to read him.

I remember photographing Westminster Dog Show with him one year and spotting Barry Bonds walking around showing his schnauzer. I’m a massive baseball fan, so immediately my heart started racing. Part of me badly wanted to introduce myself, maybe ask for a quick portrait, maybe just experience one of those surreal New York moments you end up talking about for years afterward.

Elias shut it down almost instantly.

Not politely either. More in that dry, firm, slightly dismissive way he could sometimes operate when he had already made up his mind about something.

Same thing happened later when we spotted Martha Stewart walking around the event. I’ve always admired her. Not because I’m secretly some incredible cook, but because was a visionary and built her empire through sheer creative will. Again, before I could even really react, he told me not to approach her and honestly, that bothered me.

There was an unspoken pressure to stay in your lane. Observation over intrusion. Distance over participation. Letting moments come to you instead of forcing yourself into them. But part of me still wishes I would’ve ignored him and walked over anyway.

Especially for Barry Bonds.

I honestly think there’s at least a seventy percent chance he would’ve ended up standing there talking baseball and schnauzers with me for ten minutes.

I also think part of his success came from the fact that he understood emotional branding long before most people did. He instinctively knew people weren’t just following dogs. They were following atmosphere. Aesthetics. Comfort. New York mythology. Identity. The dogs were almost acting as emotional translators for people’s own lives. That’s not easy to build accidentally.

I wouldn’t describe my experience with him as entirely positive or entirely negative. Neutral is probably the fairest word. Certain moments genuinely inspired me. Certain moments made me feel quietly ostracized. Most of it lived somewhere uncomfortably in between.

At the same time, I learned a tremendous amount from him creatively. Especially photographically. He had a very specific way of seeing dogs. Not just as cute subjects but as characters inside a larger emotional world.

Naturally, over time, I absorbed some of that and filtered it through my own instincts. Which is probably how every artist develops anyway. You borrow influence first. Then eventually your own voice starts separating itself from the noise.

Best In Show

Eventually everybody was fired all at once, including one coworker who was eight months pregnant at the time. That part never sat particularly well with me. Especially since she was the only team member who was nice to me.

Maybe there were business realities behind it that I wasn’t fully aware of. I’m willing to acknowledge that possibility. But emotionally, it was heartbreaking watching somebody entering such a vulnerable chapter of life suddenly lose stability like that.

What was strange was how differently everybody seemed to experience the ending. Some people apparently received actual calls and dismissals. I found out because my company email suddenly logged me out of Microsoft Outlook and wouldn’t let me back in.

I was angry at first but a week later I was sort of at peace with it. I already felt far removed from the team. This was just the punctuation and confirmation. It honestly felt strangely fitting in retrospect. Quietly deleted from the system the same way I had often felt quietly adjacent to it.

One thing life keeps teaching me repeatedly is that situations which initially feel painful or uncomfortable often end up redirecting people exactly where they probably needed to go.

Losing the grooming salon I helped build felt catastrophic at the time too. Looking back now, it probably forced me toward becoming more independent and more honest about the kinds of environments I actually function well inside.

Funny enough, Isabel eventually went on to build something enormously successful herself, including a New York Times bestselling book, outselling Elias’ book released in the same year. She got into foster and rescue work. Despite having only a fraction of the followers, her content eventually began generating stronger engagement numbers and, arguably, an even larger cultural footprint within the online dog world than The Dogist itself. And honestly, good for her.

There is something weirdly poetic and satisfying about watching that happen from a distance. It reminded me a little of Phil Collins eventually eclipsing Peter Gabriel commercially after their band Genesis fractured into different eras. Phil Collins started as the drummer for the band, the complimentary background member, and somehow ended up having the considerably larger mainstream career afterward. In the Air Tonight alone is one of those songs that permanently embedded itself into pop culture, and then somehow he also gave an entire generation the legendary Tarzan soundtrack on top of it.

Despite our awkward dynamic and any lingering resentment, you can’t really hate on somebody successfully building their own thing like that. At a certain point, you just have to clap for it.

That being said I don’t think I’m built particularly well for group project environments inside the dog industry anymore. Too many egos. Too many insecurities. Too many people quietly fighting for recognition, identity, authorship, validation.

I’m probably guilty of some of that myself. However over time I realized I function best when I’m building something that actually is mine.

I supposed that’s the gist of what I’m getting at. My experience is why I slowly became disillusioned with certain corners of dog influencer culture and rescue culture. After enough time around it, I started noticing how blurry the line becomes between compassion, branding, identity, and social currency.

Some of the people I respect most are foster parents, rescuers, dog walkers, volunteers, and shelter workers who have quietly dedicated decades of their lives to animals without constantly documenting themselves doing it online. The kinds of people eating gas station food going through a bad divorce who will still somehow drive two hours to help transport a rescue dog. The dog walker giving an elderly client a discounted rate because they know the person is lonely and the dog would otherwise never get outside. The shelter volunteer with diabetes, bad knees and exhaustion written all over their face still showing up every day anyway because certain dogs only trust them.

And I think part of why those people always felt more real to me is because there’s usually very little glamour attached to any of it. But social media changes incentives.

At a certain point, dogs stop being just dogs and start becoming emotional content. Sympathy becomes engagement. Engagement becomes leverage. Leverage becomes monetization, sponsorships, networking, validation. Social credit.

Once you know enough people personally, the mythology starts collapsing. You realize everybody is just a person. Complicated. Insecure. Ambitious. Lonely. Ego-driven. Kind sometimes. Performative sometimes.

And honestly, I’m not pretending to be above any of that myself. I’ve had my own ego. My own need for validation. My own performative tendencies.

But I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally chuckle now when I scroll past certain highly curated posts from dog influencers, media personalities or niche celebrities I know personally. Because once you’ve seen the real human being behind the avatar, the internet version starts feeling almost surreal.

There’s a line from one of my favorite Drake songs named Emotionless that always stuck with me. It goes:

“All these followers, but who gon’ follow me to the end

I guess I’ll make it to the end and I’ma find out then.”

Once you spend enough time around social media ecosystems professionally, you start realizing how strange the whole thing really is. Millions of people can consume fragments of your personality every day while knowing almost nothing about you as an actual human being.

Some of the loneliest, most emotionally chaotic, and morally disappointing people I’ve ever encountered were also some of the most publicly celebrated.

Honestly, I think being exposed to that world up close slowly turned me into a social media curmudgeon and hermit. The constant performance. The measuring. The chasing. The wondering why something hit or didn’t hit. The strange little dopamine casino of it all.

At this point, I think I’d rather do the work I love quietly and not need validation so badly.

I’ve had thousands of Instagram followers before. I understand the drug. Nowadays I’m more interested in becoming the kind of successful that doesn’t need to constantly announce itself. The kind that speaks for itself. Quietly, preferably with a dog nearby.

‘closes laptop rolls over on couch and snuggles with golden retriever while watching The Office’