The dog, best companion of modern life

Par Gabriel Goldberg 30 May 2026 10 min read

There is a truth most of us only half-admit, because it sounds too simple for an era that takes itself so seriously: the dog is, by a long distance, the best friend of every man and every woman. He always has been — but he has become even more so since our lives started looking like calendars. He follows us to the office, to the café, on holiday, in the stroller in Osaka and on the deck of a boat in the Maldives. And each time I catch a dog's gaze — a herder on an old Brussels tile, a quiet staffy at a bakery counter, a giant Kangal facing a marathon — I think we have underestimated how much that presence changes a day. The Maldives, late light — the posture of a dog who knows exactly where he is, and who he is with. A presence that has quietly replaced many others We talk about modern loneliness without ever naming the most ordinary remedy: a living being who waits for you, who makes you go outside, who looks at you without judging. The dog does all of this, and asks for no software update. In a time where we outsource almost everything — conversation to a screen, decisions to an algorithm, even walking to a notification — the dog reintroduces one simple demand: you go out, you breathe, you come back. For many friends around me, in Brussels and elsewhere, this has become the only non-negotiable discipline of the day. The Fédération Cynologique Internationale recognises more than 350 breeds, but the statistic that touches me is not zoological — it is the number of European…