There's another word for this that doesn't use phrases like "Burning Man" or "real life". That's: "community". My experience has been that it's harder to find and sustain enthusiastic community in the real world. When it happens it's of course great, but people in their day to day tend to be resistant to it. Temporary experience with a more open, enthusiastic, and non-judgmental community than you're normally used to can be an invigorating experience for some.
Cowering away from that difficulty isn't something to be proud of. Isolating yourself in a shell of people who agree with you isn't the right way to go about making dreams come true or enacting social change, which we badly need.
If you want a community in your life, go build one. Don't sit around telling us all how awesome it is to be a part of one that was pre-built and probably won't exist tomorrow.
We're talking about the opposite of cowering away. We're talking about the exact community building you value - both out there and back at home.
You're also clearly writing with a chip on your shoulder. I don't know what bad experience created that chip, but I'm not interested in fighting you or putting down your own experience. Please try to offer the same in return.
A temporary city turns out to be a great place for experimenting with new or at least different ideas about social organization, because it reduces the risk. Every organization has an opportunity to rebuild itself every year, so you can always decide to try something new, if you think it might work better than what you did before; if it fails, well, you just muddle through until it's time to go home and then try something different next year. There's a rhythm of organizational renewal and evolution that comes from the evanescence of the infrastructure. At home, organizations are never so flexible, and you get far fewer chances to go through the process of building one, so it's harder to develop the kind of experience that makes you good at it.
Furthermore, you can't underestimate the significance of the prohibition on commerce. Capitalism is such a pervasive element of everyday life that it's easy not to notice just how often our communities solve hard problems by simply retreating, and restating the problem in the form of a transaction. You can't get away with that at Burning Man; you have to engage with people socially if you want to get anything done. It's an extra layer of discipline that makes things harder, but more satisfying - not easier.
But pulling celebrity names out of a hat is not an argument. It's actually a fallacy. It's called appeal to authority. You should check it out, but I doubt you will.
I'm upvoting you for honesty. You're not right, but you're honest about it. I approve.
Whoever said "there's no event like Burning man on this planet" was a bit breathless, but going <<durr, try real life instead>> isn't much of a reply. If you want to start listing fallacies, I think what you have there is a false dichotomy.
Naming successful and wealthy individuals is a good counter, and we reach for naming celebrities because everyone knows them as opposed to naming Joe from accounting at XYZ corp, who has 1.2M in the bank but no one knows.
I'd take the downvotes as a job well done. I don't suggest you do it again though.
(Warning, NSFW!)
Every individual I've ever met who went to burning man was irritating, broke, begging for money, and full of "good" business ideas that were either "stolen" by huge megacorporations or just straight up idiotic business ideas "that would totally work if people weren't so close minded."
Whatever. My experience is anecdotal, and I'm not going to judge 8000 people based on my interactions with a couple of dozen.
Wait, no, that's not true. I'm totally judging all of them. You want a real human experience with unsanity and sharing and creativity and ugliness and real human stuff and burning things?
Go home to where you live. Be poor there. Hell, be moderately wealthy there.
Look, I'm about as in favor of arts and philosophy as a person can be. I spent 20 years as a professional violinist before I got in to technology. I spent years teaching music theory and history. Now that I have a better living as a developer, I volunteer for a dance company in Brooklyn, and I run an El Sisteme program in the Philippines with my brother.
I get it. There are more important things in the world than material wealth, and exploring yourself and other people in a non-traditional way is valuable.
But this is ridiculous. There are better and more honest ways to do this than burning man.
BM pisses me off because it's a waste of resources. All those people in the desert doing whatever it is they do is person-power that could be directed at a worthy cause that could accomplish the same thing.
Aside from my volunteer work I write 8 checks a year, for a thousand bucks a piece. I give them explicitly to the kinds of orgs that I don't work with on a daily or weekly basis. I give my time to orgs I know and love and care about. I give my money to those that I don't.
You want to do something good for you? You want to find out who you truly are? You want confidence to know that you're doing okay? You want to find out if your ideas have legs?
Spend a day with the homeless. Go to a foreign country and teach their poor what you already know.
Spend your Burning Man money on something that is worthwhile and will actually teach you something about yourself and your fellow man.
I really, really, really strongly despise Burning Man people. You don't actually want good for yourself or for others; you just want to feel like you are good to yourself and others.
Fuck you, I hate you all.
I hope that a hater on HN has now ruined burning man.
The best and most intellectually honest thing BM could do right now is shut the whole thing down. Burn it down.
But that will never happen. And we all know why. BM is a business now.
Businesses never commit suicide. Only people do. Maybe think about that the next time you want to go to burning man. Just sit on a phone waiting for someone who has a problem that's so bad he or she wants to end it.
None of you will ever do that because you are extreme and insane narcissists.
We are fucked. We live in a world where it's sort of okay for David Foster Wallace to kill himself, but it's also okay for idiots to go to burning man to "find" shit.
To put it the way the kids do: "I can't even . . ."
Where you go astray is when you pass judgment anyway. You are not qualified to judge the moral value of peoples' experiences at Burning Man any more than they're qualified to judge the value of your own experience and efforts.
There's a lot to legitimately critique about the event. I'm sorry you feel unwilling to see it at face value - at which point interesting discussions can really happen - and instead want to go for a fatalistic scorched earth policy of bringing down an entire community based on your own biases and personal projections.
That community will continue to welcome you if and when you ever approach it with some humility.
What I strongly, absolutely, vehemently dispute is that David Foster Wallace killing himself was anything but the worst hit English literature took, ever. Guy wouldn't have been as sharp and witty and beautiful without a long standing relationship with pitch black despair, but man how I wish he'd have lived to produce an oeuvre of Pynchonesque dimensions.
In specific response to your pondering the many faces of Burning Man - at core it's a temporary city of 70,000 people. That means it's a large and diverse place. That's why you can hear so many wildly different stories about what kind of place it is - it's each of those to the different people who seek those things.
Think of it like any other city - is New York a debaucherous party destination? A crucible for art and theater? A whitewashed yuppie land of banks and condos? An immigrant melting pot? A loud and dirty merry-go-round that never stops? A home of amazing, beautiful, inspired people who try their hardest to craft a community where people can live and thrive?
It's all of those things. And more. Cities are too complex and diverse to be reduced to a single dimension. Burning Man is no exception. There's a reason they call is Black Rock City.
In that sense, it's in so many ways a reflection of whatever you seek and however you feel. If you go into it looking to party that's what you're going to find. If you bring open energy and enthusiasm for your fellow human being, and a desire to simply connect and bond with others, you'll find that in bounds. If you bring a fear of pretentious Silicon Valley tycoons using it as their own self-serving dumping ground, you can find that if that's really where you want to direct your energies. And so on.
That's of course also why you'll continue to hear so many varied opinions on it (and so many explanations of how it's been ruined). Some people are convinced it's the epitome of civilization's decline. Others see it as the most important and nurturing community they've ever known. Etc. It's large and diverse enough to serve as a really big mirror to all the myriad ways people project their own identities onto it.
Here's a virtual hug for you! Really great post and some insightful points of view that really make me think about what you are carrying along for the ride. I hope your post helps open your own mind to all of our biases, preferences and unanswered questions that everyone faces daily.
* Don't Burn the Man, Burn the Man inside You!
There's another event that happens I'd like to tell you about.
It's a place where people get together with friends and strangers to share thoughts, ideas, drugs of one kind or another, and even gifts.
It's a place that sometimes does get ruined, and sometimes does not--most often ruined by the organizers themselves. It has a lot on common with burning man.
There are people there who will agree with your attitudes about art, music, culture, and technology. There are people who will disagree so hard they want to punch you in the face.
We even burn things down--sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.
It's a great event, and I speak for everyone involved when I suggest that you participate.
It's called real fucking life. Feel free to join us any time.