A proverb I remind myself of regularly:
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Including the times when I look out my window and wish my sapling was a bit older.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.comp...
The older I get, the harder it is to accept being bad and new at things, and it's a constant fight to remind myself that it's okay to suck.
Pretty much every year between then and when I last went (in '14) there were new rules which people claimed "ruined the evnt forever!!!" - in '99 Steve couldn't run The Drive-By Shooting Gallery again because they banned guns. Erin's camp stopped being allowed to use theirliquid fuelled flamethrowers in around '03 or '04. The Lawrence Livermore Labs guys got told they couldn't bring their big lasers out and paint animations on the mountain range in '10 or so... But at the same time, there was always some amazing new thing to see. I don't regret any of my trips out there. I still plan to get back there again one day.
Yeah, I wonder what the earliest article about that is. I did a brief search for the decline of Burning Man found a Wired article from 1997[1] (and of course numerous people talking about the decline later, like this blog post from 2004[2]).
It reminds me of all those "I'm 13, is it too late for me to start learning programming/body building/learning the guitar/studying Japanese/etc." type posts. If you don't do something you're interested in because you think its too late, there's a good chance that a decade later you'll be kicking yourself for not having done it.
[1] https://www.wired.com/1997/07/burning-man-burnout/ [2] https://eplaya.burningman.org/viewtopic.php?t=7447