How common are puppy blues, really?

I’d never heard the term before I started doing a lot of research into golden retrievers (puppy pickup in just over two weeks!) but I’ve been seeing it a lot since then.

I grew up with dogs, I got two puppies of my own in my early 20s, my parents have two more dogs, my extended family has almost as many dogs as people at any given moment, the neighbors have dogs, everyone has dogs and generation after generation of them and this is just nothing I’ve ever seen nor experienced in reality.

Part of me wants to say that it’s a mixture of over-researching everything imaginable before getting a dog (really not necessary; we’ve been raising dogs for millennia without any of this) which is great on the one hand to hopefully maximize the dog’s quality and quantity of life, but on the other hand it also seems to be a huge issue with the misery a lot of people online seem to experience with puppies. A constant in pretty much all of the posts I’ve seen seems to be something to the effect of “I feel guilty/like I’m not doing enough/I’m overwhelmed” and the vast majority of them appear to be putting human newborn levels of work into even the tiniest (and often largely superfluous) minutiae with their new puppy.

And then part of me is also concerned that maybe everyone around here and in my past experiences was a fluke. And part of me is also concerned that I’ll placebo myself into somehow getting depressed over it since I’m now just as guilty of obsessively googling myself.

How common are puppy blues, really?