Any idea what the most popular hobby is in the US?
Take a minute. Think about it.
Pickleball? Golf? Binge-watching something on Netflix?
Nope.
Suffering.
Everybody's addicted to it. They can't get enough. They are constantly — consciously or not — looking for ways to suffer.
"Did you see how she looked at me?"
"They didn't even acknowledge me after I held the door open for them."
"I can't believe she would talk to me like that."
Sound familiar?
Your mind is scanning for this stuff all day long. Looking for evidence. Building cases. Replaying moments. Generating feelings about things that happened hours or years ago.
And here's what's wild: most people have no idea they're doing it.
It's not your fault. But it is your mind.
Here's something I tell almost every client I work with:
Your mind works perfectly. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The problem isn't your mind. It's the instructions it was given.
Long before you had any say in the matter — before you were old enough to question or evaluate or push back — your mind was being programmed. By the people around you. By the experiences you had. By the conclusions you drew from those experiences before you had the tools or wisdom to draw accurate ones.
Those instructions became the lens through which you see everything.
And that lens has been generating suffering ever since. Not because something is wrong with you. But because the information it's working from was never updated.
Why insight doesn't fix it
Most people who find their way to my office have already done the work.
They've read the books. They've tried therapy. They understand their history. They can tell you exactly why they react the way they do.
And it keeps happening anyway.
This is the part that frustrates people most. Because the conventional wisdom says that insight leads to change. That if you understand why you do something, you can stop doing it.
But here's the problem with that:
For most people, awareness never arrives at all.
The reaction fires before conscious thought has any chance to intervene. The argument is already underway. The anxiety is already running. And you have no idea why — only that something painful keeps happening, no matter what you try.
This is why insight doesn't fix it. You can't think your way out of something that forms before thinking begins.
The thing about time
Here's where it gets interesting.
Think about something that happened to you years ago. Something painful. Something you've told yourself you're over.
Now notice what just happened in your body when you thought about it.
That sensation, that tightening, that flash of feeling — that's not the past. That's right now. Your mind doesn't distinguish between then and now. It doesn't know the difference between something that's happening and something that happened decades ago.
It just keeps generating the same feeling. On demand. Indefinitely.
Until the information generating it gets updated.
This is why someone can carry something from childhood into their marriage, into their boardroom, into their relationships with their own children, all without ever connecting the dots. The original event is long over. The suffering it generates is very much alive.
A businessman asked me what I do
Not long ago a business acquaintance in line at a coffee shop asked me what I did for a living.
I said: "I disappear suffering."
He made a quizzical face. Then: "Is suffering really that common?"
I told him it's the most popular hobby in America. Everybody's doing it. Practically a national pastime.
He laughed. Then he got quiet.
Then he became a client.
Because somewhere in that exchange something landed. Not the joke — the truth underneath it. What he'd been calling "stress" and "overthinking" and "that's just how I am" was actually something generating itself. Automatically. Repeatedly. From instructions that were never accurate to begin with.
Two sessions later he told me it was the most beneficial thing he'd ever done.
What "disappearing" actually means
I don't manage suffering. I don't teach people to cope with it more effectively. I don't give them tools to use when it shows up.
I go directly to what's been generating it — and clear it.
When the information generating the suffering gets updated — when the misread gets corrected — the suffering stops forming. Not because the person is trying harder. Not because they've developed better coping strategies.
Because the thing generating it simply isn't generating it anymore.
What's left isn't coping.
It's clarity. Ease. A sense of power and flexibility that most people didn't think was still possible.
And the absence of something they'd filed away as "that's just how I am."
It wasn't.
"Whether it shows up as anxiety, depression, relationship conflict, or just a persistent feeling that something is wrong — the source is the same."
And so is the solution.
Suffering is common. Almost universal.
But it isn't beneficial. And it certainly isn't necessary.
If something keeps happening that you want to stop — that's not who you are. That's information that needs updating.
That's exactly what I do.
Randel Porter, LPC practices individual and couples therapy in San Antonio and throughout Texas by secure video. If something keeps happening that you want to stop, a brief no-cost consultation is a good place to start.