Your pet doesn’t care if you’re popular. Being around something that loves you without a performance is a good reset.

An animal has no interest in your standing. There is nothing to maintain, nothing to be interesting about, which makes it one of the few relationships in your life with no audition in it. That is why ten minutes with a dog or a cat can rescue an evening a screen was making worse. The absence of performance is the active ingredient.

Give it real attention this week rather than the absent-minded sort: sit on the floor, no phone. If there is no animal in your life, look for that quality in somebody who has known you long enough that nothing is left to prove.