This week, a philosophical dilemma starting with dog food and ending up in the realms of human happiness.
A Dog Food Dilemma
Imagine you have a dog called Crumble. Crumble seems a perfectly happy dog. Like most dogs, Crumble eats the same healthy dog food, day-in, day-out. It’s nutritious, and just the sight of you walking to the cupboard sparks visible excitement. She’ll run over to the bowl and start gobbling it down before you’ve spooned it all from the can.
To Crumble, this is what dinner is.
One day, a friend comes round with some leftover “luxury” dog food. It’s proper posh stuff. It smells richer and It has little chunks of meat that look nicer than anything you ever cook for yourself.
Crumble has been particularly affectionate recently. She deserves a treat, you think.
You open the can and Crumble’s eyes widen. Her tail helicopters around and the bowl is polished so clean it looks like it’s been through a dishwasher.
Of course, the next day, she has to go back to her normal food. You can’t afford to buy the posh nosh. You’d probably struggle to buy it even occasionally.
Crumble sniffs her usual food. She looks at you, and looks back at the bowl.
She eventually eats it, and looks rather disappointed afterwards.
Would it have been better never to give Crumble the luxury food in the first place?
You might want to give your pupils two options to start with:
Option A: Always give Crumble the ordinary healthy food, so she never knows anything better exists.
Option B: Give Crumble ordinary healthy food most of the time, but sometimes give her something much nicer, even though this may make ordinary food seem worse afterwards.
This is a nice opportunity to use our “Sides then Selves” principle, but with a twist. Get the class to form two parallel lines facing each other. Each side steps forward, shaking hands with their opposite number. Ask one line to argue for Option A, and the other for Option B, but for a bit fun, ask them to imagine they’re talking as Crumble.
You might hear thoughts like…
“You’ve ruined my normal dinner.”
“Don’t show me something amazing if I can’t have it again.”
“I can’t miss something if I’ve never had it.”
or…
“It’s still better to have one brilliant dinner.”
“I’d rather have some joy than no joy.”
“This will make me live in hope of having it again!”
This is a fairly low stakes scenario, and allows everyone to find their voice talking about something relatable. But without realising, they’ll also be talking about the nature of happiness, and the influence on what we experience, what we expect, and what we compare things to.
Other contexts and wider questions
I’m reminded of articles I’ve read about dopamine, and how our moment-to-moment happiness can be dictated by the comparison of what we’ve recently done with what we’re doing now. An Instagram post will be far more interesting to read if you didn’t see an even more interesting one a second before. A supermarket pizza will probably be enjoyed far more if you didn’t go out for steak the night before.
- Can a happy experience make your life worse afterwards?
- If it’s generally agreed that happy experiences are a good thing, how can we make sure that attempts to be happier don’t end up making us unhappier?
- Would your answer about Crumble change if this was about a human rather than a pet?
- When might it be right to keep someone happy by keeping them ignorant? When might it be wrong?
A big thanks to Tom’s friends Katie and Ben Campbell, and their dog Terry, for the idea behind this week’s bulletin. No animals were harmed in the making of this bulletin, but they may be fed the same boring biscuits each day.
PS from Jason
A vegetarian friend of mine recently grabbed a snack for her daughter from a roadside services in Rwanda, thinking it was a cheese roll.
Upon first bite, her daughter turned around and said “Mummy, what is this? This is so delicious!”
It turned out there was ham in the roll too – and this is what had made her daughter’s tastebuds light up.
So my friend faced a moral dilemma – should she, as someone who had brought up her daughter vegetarian and never cooked meat, and now knowing her daughter loves the taste of meat, “fess up” and tell her daughter what she’d just eaten – and potentially open her to a whole new world of delicious but ethically questionable cuisine?
Or should she stay schtum and think “I’m a vegetarian – my house (or car), my rules”?
What are we up to?
Since last week’s bulletin, Jason has been busy:
Wednesday saw him deliver live lessons and CPD at Abacus School in Wickford as part of the Essex Year of Opportunity. Thursday he was at Harris Academy Morden for our annual contribution to an off-timetable day for Year 10, and Saturday spoke at the IAPS T&L Festival at The Dragon School in Oxford – an event we sponsored.
I (Tom) was off last week, but our sister company that I co-run, Hidden Leaders, delivered another fantastic teambuilding day for staff at Headstart Residential Homes.
Best wishes,
Tom and Jason