I suffer, but why?

An authentic Westerner!
At first I thought this was going to play out like a scene from 'Can Fat Teens Hunt', but when you started questioning your own motivations it brought to mind a quote from Anthropologist, Roger Sandall. "Westerners are bored, westerners are idle, westerners have too much money, and they look around the world and think, 'will I try base jumping, will I try going up a rocky canyon in a high speed boat? what will I do next? Oh, well you know, Monty said we should go and look at natives in Papua New Guinea, lets try that! And we might even be shot at!" ;-)

Authentic doesn't have to mean suffering...
Buddha found that all mankind suffers due to unsatisfied desire. So if everything is suffering, but not everything is authentic, then logically they do not equate. Anyway, do you think that this has anything to do with being in the inner core of the backpacker life? Does being a backpacker mean that you choose to suffer because you think that is authentic...staying at the cheapest rooms, traveling on the cheapest transportation, etc. even though spending a couple dollars more will provide that fan and a decent toilet or get you from point A to B in two hours (think Air Asia) instead of twenty four hours of scams. I'm reminded of the musings of AspiringNomad who transitioned from that inner core to being a family man...and your own musings on your own transitions. As for me, I enjoy comfortable authenticity!