The guy who asked about suffering

I want to tell you about a conversation from last Saturday that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

It happened at The Board Walks, the weekly walk Elle and I host here in Austin. Our friend Julia normally leads it, but she’s eight months pregnant, so I’ve been filling in.

Last Saturday morning it was 24 degrees in Austin.

Which for Texas, might as well be the Arctic.

My hands went numb within ten minutes. Everyone showed up bundled in jackets and beanies, breath visible in the air. The kind of cold that makes you question why you left the house.

About 25 people came that morning.

Normally we get 80 to 100 when the weather’s nice. But the people who show up in the cold? They’re always the right ones.

We did our usual intro circle in the parking lot, huddled close, everyone sharing what they’re grateful for and their topics for conversation. Then we started walking.

The trail follows the water. The morning sun was creeping over the horizon, painting everything gold.

About ten minutes in, I ended up walking next to this guy.

He’d been quiet during the intro, but once we started moving, he asked me something that turned the whole walk into one of the best conversations I’ve had in months.

“Can I ask you something kind of heavy?”

His nose was already red from the cold. He pulled his jacket tighter.

“Of course.”

“What do you think about suffering? Like, how much of it is actually necessary?”

I smiled. The kind of question people avoid everywhere else but ask naturally on The Board Walks.

“What made you think about that?”

“I guess I’ve been thinking about how we’re all out here freezing our asses off voluntarily. Like, is this suffering? Or is it just discomfort?”

“I’ve thought about this exact thing. Because no matter how many times you experience being cold, you’re still cold the next time. You don’t get stronger at it. So is it just pointless suffering?”

He nodded. “Exactly. Like, what’s the point?”

A cyclist passed us, shirtless even in this weather, completely in his own world.

“I think there’s a difference between pain and suffering.”

“I’ve heard that before,” he said. “But what does that actually mean?”

“Pain is the feeling. The cold. The physical sensation. That’s real and unavoidable if you’re out here. But suffering is the story we tell ourselves about it. It’s the resistance. It’s the ‘why is this happening to me’ or ‘I shouldn’t have to deal with this.’”

I could see him processing this.

“So we’re all experiencing the same cold, but some of us are suffering about it and some of us aren’t?”

“Exactly. And the cold is the same either way.”

We walked in silence for a minute. The trail curved, and I could see more people from our group scattered ahead and behind us, all in their own conversations.

“Okay, but what about emotional stuff?” he asked. “Like, loneliness. That feels like suffering you can’t just decide not to feel.”

This hit something in me.

“Yeah. Loneliness is a big one.”

“You ever feel lonely?”

“For the first 24 years of my life, I felt deeply lonely almost every single day.”

He looked surprised. “Really? You seem like someone who’s always had a lot of people around.”

“I did have people around. That’s the thing.”

I thought about this one night during my freshman year of college.

There was this huge party at one of the frat houses. The place was absolutely packed. Music so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. I was standing in the kitchen with a red cup in my hand, surrounded by probably 200 people.

And I felt completely invisible.

Not like people were ignoring me. I was talking to people. Laughing at jokes. Playing beer pong. Doing all the things you’re supposed to do.

But I felt like I was watching it all happen from behind glass.

Like I was there but not really there. Present but not connected. Surrounded but completely alone.

I left early that night. Walked back to my dorm by myself. It was cold then too, actually. And I remember standing outside my building thinking, what the hell is wrong with me?

Why can’t I just feel what everyone else seems to feel?

“I could be at a party with 200 people,” I told him, “or in a relationship, or hanging out with my best friends, and still feel completely alone.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. And I spent years thinking something was wrong with me. Like, why can’t I just feel connected?”

He was quiet, just listening.

“And then I moved to Bali for a couple years. Part of what happened there was I ended up spending a lot of time alone. Like, truly alone. Not by choice at first, but because I didn’t know anyone and I was in a completely foreign place.”

“How’d that go?”

“At first? Terrible. I felt more lonely than ever. But then, gradually, over months, something shifted.”

“I realized I had two options. I could see being alone as a prison sentence. Or I could see it as a challenge to actually sit with myself and figure out how to enjoy my own company.”

“Couldn’t you have just, like, gone to networking events or worked at coffee shops?” he asked. “Met people that way?”

“Yeah, I could have. And part of me wanted to. But there was something inside telling me that wasn’t the move. Like, now wasn’t the time to force connections. It was time to connect with the one person I’d been avoiding my whole life.”

“Yourself.”

“Myself. And that was way scarier than just staying busy.”

We were at the halfway point now. The sun had broken through the clouds fully. It was still cold, but the light made everything feel different.

“Here’s what I realized. There’s this backlog of conversations we’re supposed to have with ourselves as we go through life. And most of us just keep avoiding them. We stay busy. We fill the space. We distract ourselves.”

“Yeah.”

“But all those things we’re avoiding don’t just disappear. They stack up. Like voicemails you never listen to. And the longer you avoid them, the heavier it feels.”

He nodded slowly.

“And I realized something else. Most of my friendships weren’t just friendships. They were just ways to keep avoiding those voicemails.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I had this friend. I’ll call him Jake. We’d been friends since seventh grade. Sat next to each other in math class and just kind of stayed friends through high school and into college.”

“Okay.”

“Good guy. Nothing wrong with him. But when I really thought about it, I couldn’t remember a single meaningful conversation we’d ever had. We’d talk about sports. Which girls were hot. Video games. Surface level stuff that filled the time but never went deeper.”

“So you were just filling space?”

“Exactly. We’d text every few days, call on each other’s birthdays, grab drinks whenever we were both home. But it was all just noise. All distraction. A way to avoid sitting with myself.”

“That’s heavy.”

“And it wasn’t just him. It was most of my relationships. I realized I was friends with so many people just because we happened to sit next to each other in middle school. Because we were in proximity, not because we actually chose each other.”

We walked in silence for a moment. I could hear other conversations from our group echoing around us.

“And look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with sports talk or video games or catching up over drinks. That’s all part of friendship. But when that’s ALL there is? When every interaction stays on the surface and nothing ever goes deeper? You start to feel it. That low-grade emptiness that builds up over time.”

“So what did you do?”

“About a year ago, I stopped. I stopped proactively reaching out to people. All the people I normally texted first, called first, made plans with first. I just stopped.”

“And?”

“90% of those relationships just disappeared.”

His eyes widened. “Wow.”

“Yeah. When I stopped being the one to text Jake first, we just stopped talking. No fight. No falling out. Just silence.”

“That must have hurt.”

“At first, yeah. And honestly, it still does sometimes. Jake was a good friend. We had a lot of fun together over the years. I don’t want to act like that didn’t matter.”

“But?”

“But I also realized something uncomfortable. I wasn’t just losing a friend. I was losing someone I’d been unconsciously using as a distraction from what really mattered to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every time I didn’t follow through on something that mattered, every time I took the easy path over the true one, another voicemail got left on my internal machine. And instead of listening to those messages, I’d just text Jake. Make plans. Fill the space with noise.”

He nodded slowly, like he understood exactly what I meant.

“So when Jake’s texts stopped, when that silence happened, I finally had space to listen. All those feelings and thoughts and questions I’d been pushing down by staying busy? They finally had room to come up.”

“How did that feel?”

“Overwhelming at first. Like I’d reached maximum capacity and couldn’t take any more calls. There was no delete button. I just had to sit there and listen to every single message.”

“That sounds brutal.”

“It was. But here’s what else I noticed. Every day, for as long as I could remember, there was this voice in my head. Like a harsh judge constantly critiquing everything and everyone. Especially me.”

“I know that voice.”

“Right? But as I listened to those voicemails, as I processed them one by one, that judging voice started to quiet down. The more I faced what I’d been avoiding, the less that voice had to say.”

“It just went away?”

“Not completely. But it got so much quieter. To the point where now it’s almost non-existent. And the weight I’d been carrying? That started lifting too.”

“How long did that take?”

“A few years of being really conscious of it. Every month or so, I’d take a day or two of complete silence. Away from everyone. Just sitting with myself. Those were the big leaps forward.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“Daily practice. Walking without headphones. Giving myself space to think instead of always filling it. That’s what really cleared the backlog.”

We turned a corner on the trail. More people from our group were coming back the other way now, finishing their conversations.

“But once I got through most of it, once the backlog was mostly clear, everything changed.”

“How?”

“I got to the point where I genuinely didn’t need anyone else. Where I wasn’t trying to fill space or avoid silence. Where I could just be alone with myself and actually enjoy it.”

“And then people showed up?”

“And then people showed up. The right people. It’s like I became magnetic for connection the moment I stopped desperately needing it.”

He smiled. “That’s kind of ironic.”

“It’s extremely ironic. It’s like the coolest kid in the room is always the one who doesn’t care about looking cool.”

“So you think loneliness is optional too?”

I didn’t answer right away.

“I think the suffering around loneliness is optional. The feeling of being alone? Sometimes that just comes with the season of life you’re in. But the suffering, the story of ‘I’m broken because I’m alone’ or ‘something’s wrong with me,’ that’s optional.”

“Because you learned to sit with yourself.”

“Because I finally listened to the voicemails. And realized I was the only person who could answer them.”

We were about halfway through the trail when we saw them.

A small herd of goats grazing near the side of the path. They’re brought in every so often to clear out the brush and debris, keep everything maintained naturally.

“Hold up,” I said. “We gotta say hi.”

A few other people from our group had stopped too. The goats were unbothered by all of us, just doing their thing, munching on weeds.

I reached out and scratched one behind the ears. He did the same with another one.

“You know what’s wild?” I said. “I spent all that time processing the mental and emotional stuff. But I learned something else too.”

“What?”

“Animals don’t hold trauma the way we do. You ever notice how after something stressful happens, they just shake it off? Like, literally physically shake their whole body?”

He watched the goat he was petting, its ear twitching under his hand.

“They’re releasing all that energy right there in the moment. And then they’re done. They don’t carry it.”

“And we don’t do that.”

“We don’t. We hold it. We store it. We let it build up for years.”

The goat I was petting looked up at me, completely present, completely unbothered by anything except the patch of grass in front of it.

“So what do you do instead?”

“I’ve learned to shake it off. Literally. Sometimes I jump on a trampoline. Sometimes I go for a run or have an intense workout. Sometimes I just walk around and let my body move however it wants. Sometimes I literally look like a little kid throwing a tantrum.”

He laughed. “Really?”

“Really. My fiancé has seen it. It’s not pretty. But it works.”

I paused, watching the goats for a second.

“Emotions are just energy in motion. That’s literally all they are. And if we just move our bodies, like how we used to naturally as kids, it helps us release them.”

“Energy in motion,” he repeated. “I like that.”

“Right before something big is about to happen in my life, before I launch a new business, before a major transition, I always have this period where I’m just irritable. Grumpy. It’s the old version of me resisting what’s next. Because for something new to come in, something old has to die.”

“So you don’t fight it?”

“I don’t fight it. I let myself shake it off. Feel it fully. Move it through my body. And then it’s gone.

That’s the difference between pain and suffering. The pain is real. The emotion is real. But if you let it move through you instead of storing it, it doesn’t become suffering.”

We walked in comfortable silence for a while after that.

The sun was fully out now. My hands had warmed up. It was still cold, but it felt different somehow. Less like something to resist and more like just what is.

Other people from our group were starting to loop back. I could hear laughter from somewhere behind us.

“Thanks for this conversation,” he said as we got close to the end of the route.

“Thank you for asking good questions.”

“I’m going to think about that goat thing.”

I smiled. “Good. The goats have mastered what most humans spend decades in therapy trying to figure out.”

We made it back to where we started. Everyone gathering for the group photo, cold noses and warm smiles.

I stood there thinking about how weird life is.

That college party where I felt invisible in a crowd of 200.

Bali, sitting alone for months.

And now here, hosting a walk where 25 people showed up in 24-degree weather to ask each other hard questions.

Funny how it all works out.

The suffering wasn’t in the loneliness itself.

It was in the story I told myself about it.

And once I let myself feel the pain without making it mean something about me, everything shifted.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

And sometimes you just gotta shake it off like a goat.

Thanks for reading this one all the way through.

I’m having a lot of fun flexing different creative muscles with these newsletters. This conversational style felt right for this story, but I’ve got all kinds of formats and ideas I’m excited to explore.

More real-life stories coming your way in future weeks. Thanks for joining me along this journey.

You are loved, and you are enough exactly as you are.

-Cameron

P.S. The photo below is from the walk. Cold hands, warm smiles.

Note: This reflection was written by Cameron Hogan after hosting the walk in Austin. It was originally shared on his newsletter, The Cam Diaries, on February 6 2026.