What happens when the noise stops
- Cameron Hogan
- May 21
- 6 min read
Some mornings I show up to the walk and I already have a question.
The kind that arrived in my brain sometime between waking up and the first cup of coconut water and just sat there, waiting.
This past Saturday, the question was: "If all the distractions just disappeared tomorrow, what would happen to us?"
I'd been on a podcast the night before. The host asked it. And I couldn't stop turning it over.
So I brought it to the opening circle.
I said: "I'm grateful for how many people came despite the forecast. I want to know what you think would happen to human nature if all the noise suddenly, completely, went quiet."
And then I listened to everyone else's topics.
A man named John said he was living his dream life. He was curious about something intriguing... he wasn't sure what yet.
A woman named Abby said she was thinking about what it means to live a capital-R Right life.
A woman named Stephanie said she'd been feeling more purpose lately, after a long period of not. She'd felt it missing for years.
A man named Aditya, new to Austin, new to the country, said he believed life is a teacher. He wanted to know: what do you think life is trying to teach?
And that was just the first five.
I thought: we have 40 more people to go.
I also thought: every single one of these questions is a version of the same question.
There is a thing that happens in the opening circle that I've tried to describe to people who've never done the walk, and I always fall short.
It goes like this: a group of strangers stand in a loop in a parking lot on a Saturday morning. Sometimes it's 10 people, sometimes 100. Each person says their name. Each person says what they're grateful for — and this is never throwaway, people actually think about it, a man said drummers, a woman said fruit, a new arrival from Germany said the city that welcomed me.
And then each person says the topic they're bringing to the trail.
What they're thinking about. What's been rattling around. What they can't figure out yet.
And in about twelve minutes, you learn more about the interior lives of forty strangers than you'd learn from forty dinners with most people you know.
That morning, I heard someone ask about self-care, someone ask about peptides, someone ask about what the UAPs mean for humanity, someone ask about the last time you made a real friend and what made them stick. I heard people talk about moving and grief and what it means to belong somewhere.
I thought about my question. What would you do if the noise stopped?
It occurred to me that I was already watching the answer.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about the walk:
Showing up is hard.
I don't mean physically. Five miles is not a triathlon. The trail is flat. There are water fountains.
I mean the other kind of hard. The kind where it's 7:45 on a Saturday and the bed is warm and your body is running a very sophisticated cost-benefit analysis about whether human connection is really worth putting on shoes for.
A woman named Lori said it in the circle: I'm grateful that I got myself out of bed this morning to get here.
A man, third week in a row, told me before the walk started that he'd spent that morning arguing with himself about whether to come.
I've been hosting this walk for months. I can tell you with complete honesty that I've had the same argument. Probably more times than I'd like to admit. There is something that is very good at convincing you that what you have at home is enough.
That the walk can wait. That next week would be easier.
And yet.
Every time I've won the argument with myself, I've walked back to the parking lot afterward and thought: "I can't believe I almost didn't come."
Not because something dramatic happened. Usually nothing dramatic happens.
It's more like: I spent two and a half hours being a human being with other human beings, and now I feel more like myself than I did this morning.
Later in the walk, I ended up in a long conversation with a woman — I'll call her Maya — who had moved to Austin about six months ago but spent half that time traveling for work.
She said she'd caught herself feeling bad that she didn't have many friends in Austin yet. Comparing her current life to her social life in San Francisco three years back, which had been full and established, built over years.
And then she said: "But instead of being a hater about it, I've been trying to see the space differently. There's so much space in my life right now."
She said the word space like it was a good thing.
I stopped walking for a second.
We use that word all the time to describe a problem: I have too much space, I don't have plans, the weekend is open. And she was using it to describe abundance. Room to fill deliberately. Room to decide what goes there.
I thought about my question again.
What would you do if the noise stopped?
What if the noise stopping isn't the crisis we've been treating it as? What if the space it leaves isn't emptiness but capacity?
There was a man who'd come to his first walk.
He said at the end: "I think this was something I needed. I have a lot of friends from college. I like my friends from college. But I don't want them to be the last friends I ever make."
He said it plainly, without drama. Like it was a fact he'd just remembered.
I've heard some version of this more times than I can count. Usually from people in their mid-to-late twenties, newly arrived in a city, three years deep into a job that accounts for most of their waking hours. The social life of their early twenties — which felt like it would just be there forever — quietly evaporated. And one Saturday morning they find a Meetup page and they think: well, let's see.
What the walk does (what I didn't fully understand when Elle started it in 2022 and what I'm still learning to describe) is it re-teaches a skill that none of us realized we forgot.
The skill of showing up somewhere without a transaction in mind. Of talking to a stranger not because you want something from them but because you're both alive on the same morning and that's enough of a reason.
It's embarrassingly simple. It feels almost too small to be the thing.
And yet it's the thing.
The question I brought to the circle never got a single definitive answer.
That's not how the walk works. You throw something into the air and the trail catches it, turns it over, hands it between thirty or forty people, and gives it back to you different.
What I got back was this:
The noise doesn't actually need to stop for people to show up as themselves. They can choose to step out of it. For two and a half hours. On a Saturday morning. When they could have stayed in bed.
And they do. Week after week, in Austin and Detroit and London and Sacramento and Columbus and Madrid and a dozen more cities, in weather that looked like it was going to be a problem but turned out to be fine... in the way that most things turn out to be fine once you're already standing in them.
The man who'd argued with himself that morning to get out of bed?
By the end of the walk, he was talking to someone about intuition and how to trust it.
By the end of the walk, the woman who'd reframed her empty social calendar as space was laughing with someone she'd just met.
By the end of the walk, the newcomer who didn't want his college friends to be his last friends was exchanging contact information with three people he'd only known for two and a half miles.
Nobody turned off the internet, and nothing disappeared.
They just walked out the door. And the rest, the conversations, the questions, the thing that feels rarer and rarer and somehow still finds us every Saturday... followed.
That's what I think would happen if the noise stopped.
I think we'd remember that we already know how to do this.
Cameron Hogan is the co-founder of The Board and host of The Board Walks in Austin, Texas.
