A version of this post has been sitting in my drafts for basically an entire month, so long in fact that instead of timing it with this year’s “Virtual Burn” it may actually be better to time this with Burning Man Org’s current #SaveBRC campaign and pretend I did it on purpose. This year’s festival was responsibly canceled due to the global pandemic, but if you’re reading this and are a Burner - or if this post inspires you to check it out next year - consider donating so that we can make sure there actually will be a “next year.”
To some extent, this is a topic that has no “right answer” and a post that can never actually be finished - Burning Man exists as the aggregate of inter-subjective experiences, it exists in everyone’s head from a slightly different perspective (WE are the Playa! 🤯), and all the cliches about there being “no right way to do it” do hold true to a large extent.
That said, the most common topic for virgin burners for some crazy reason is to try to define “What is Burning Man?” (or, when they see something particularly mind blowing while roaming the desert “What is this place!?”).
Gathered around a circle in an open bar camp in the late afternoon, a young tech bro covered in dust interjects “no, it’s actually the revival of the Roman Holiday, Saturnalia” 🤓 while a sparkle pony just tells you she’s there to see some artist that you are supposed to know but instead have to pretend you know (“do you know where Robot Heart is going to be tonight???”).
So for whatever reason, this question comes up every year, even if it doesn’t really have an answer. Instead of trying to define what Burning Man is, it’s probably better to ask the qualitative stuff: “why is it special?” “what makes it cool?” “why do brilliant beautiful people fall down the dusty rabbit hole and turn into desert maenads every year?”
I originally considered these questions and have a list I share informally with my camp every year - in true pagan festival fashion it’s survived via oral tradition and the list grows every year. Given that we did not get to gather on the Playa this year - and in theory we may never meet on the Playa again (though it will probably be fine) - I figured it was time to put this talk into writing to preserve the tradition.
Why Burning Man is Cool:
Dust is Cool
Honestly, many of the people who attend Burning Man are coastal city dwellers and/or in the international professional class. The desert is a rugged, aesthetic, romantic land that is foreign to many. You want the Mad Max photo, sure, but you didn’t realize what it would feel like to be a chinchilla in a dust bath.
The dust cakes everywhere and soon you stop fucking caring. The desert consumes you and soon you are one with it. You become the Playa.
Dust is just so fucking Cool.
Black Rock City is an Opt-In Society
Everyone is born into the world without their consent. Our entire Civilization is made up of people that are just there automatically, by default, disagreeing on the terms of engagement. The social contract is a lie. So many people are there accidentally, so very few live deliberately.
This is not true in Black Rock City.
Getting to Burning Man requires WORK, it’s a significant investment in time, energy, preparation, capital, love and various other scarce resources. It’s a huge hassle to get to the desert, especially if you are coming in from abroad (or even just from outside of Nevada and California).
In addition to the investment of energy, there are clear terms of engagement, everyone there is taught the 10 Principles before they enter BRC. The 10 Principles (with the unofficial 11th appropriately being “Consent”) are a set of guidelines that you don’t realize are ingenious until you are really in the thick of things there. Buy-in to the 10 Principles turns everyone from an individual operator, to a node in some larger systemic organism, a human hive.
The combination of the significant upfront work and the pre-agreed upon rules of engagement creates something that’s nothing short of actual magic. Everyone there is deliberate and fully bought-into the premise. It’s a 70k+ person Civilization of 100% agency.
Collectively, the sum of the experience becomes something greater, something transcendent.
Having a Tribe is Really Nice
In the US, you leave home for college and if you’re ambitious and do everything right… you never move back in with your family. Some people come from bad family lives. Some people are in toxic friendships or relationships. Perhaps the most cynical take of San Francisco tech is that it’s a bunch of man-children trying to rebuild the services that their mothers would perform via on-demand service apps because they have no idea how to connect with other humans and with the world. At minimum, urban life in America is plagued with ambitious opportunists that can be hard to make even shallow connections with; bullshit status games abound.
Modern urban life can be cold and isolating, you likely already know this.
Burning Man doesn’t promise to solve the existential isolation of modernity, nobody can promise you that. However, if you open yourself to the full experience and are ready to make the effort, Black Rock City can be an excellent place to start to chip away at it.
If you go to Burn Man with a camp - of any size - you will be surrounded by other people that will at minimum have your back - and very likely may become some of your dearest friends. You get together in a camp to share water, shelter, food, other survival basics, and much more.
There’s something ancient and perennial about this formation, you temporarily suspend the isolating individualism of modern life to go live in a desert tribe and wear evening-furs. You become wolves riding around on bikes with LEDs, howling at the sunset.
Like any tribe, not everyone is going to instantly be your best friend or totally understand you or even particularly like you - but you will have their back and they will have yours - and that connection alone is a wonderful feeling that a lot of lonely people don’t often experience anymore.
Having a tribe is quite nice.
Burning Man is a Safe Place for Experimentation
Because of the 10 Principles (most of them explicitly relevant to this point), the sheer scale of the city (70k+ people), the immediate support network around you (your friends, your camp, the entire community), and the general open culture - Burning Man is a shockingly safe and judgement-free plane of existence.
Every scene you can think of is there, ready for you to explore it.
This can have its downsides, definitely - as you will frequently be confronted with things that are shocking or uncomfortable to you. By no means are you promised a good time and if you are closed to these things then the Playa is likely not for you.
However, the upside to this openness is where all of the magic happens. People come to Burning Man to set aside who they are in the default world and try on new modes of existence. People don’t really give a shit about who you are on the outside and it’s incredibly liberating.
Uncomfortable with nudity? Go walk around with your business out in the middle of the desert.
Want to experiment with mind expanding substances? The entire environment and community can provide a safe, open place to do so - and in fact much of the setup is indirectly constructed to facilitate this. (Allegedly!)
Have you ever wanted to make art? Perform music? Cool, the entire thing is a stage for this - go help contribute to making everyone else’s experience amazing.
Do you feel you don’t properly express yourself in the real world? Nobody knows or cares who you are on the Playa, so you can be whoever the fuck you want.
People are generally looking out for your well being and don’t put unfair expectations on you - it’s all a big playground.
Burning Man is a Space for Rituals
If the fact that the entire purpose of the festival is a week long build-up to burn a symbolic effigy didn’t give this one away, I’m not sure I can explain much more on this one.
Despite the conception that we are all new wave yuppie-hippies on spiritual journeys, people at Burning Man can be surprisingly snarky and cynical. Despite this, if you make the effort to Honor the Playa in some way, that space for rituals is very much celebrated.
Burning Man can be a place for introspection, spectacle, and reverence - rituals to honor something lost, to hope for something better, to celebrate love, or just commemorate a beautiful moment are all a part of the collective experience.
Nowhere is this more evident than the Temple each year, an overwhelming place where we go to honor and celebrate the dead, among other things. By the end of the week, the walls get lined with tributes to our lost loved ones and at the end of the week we burn it all down. A heavy dose of memento mori in the midst of so much jubilation and festivities brings its own immense cathartic high.
The Apollonian & The Dionysian
In the same way that modern society can be isolating and lonely, it also involves structure, hierarchy, discipline, order, restraint - it lacks chaos, spontaneity, ecstasy, wildness.
There’s a broader philosophical discourse on the Apollonian and the Dionysian - they are two critical dualities of the human experience:
In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, and appeals to emotions and instincts. The Ancient Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although they were often entwined by nature.
Burning Man draws together a crowd of people who largely thrive in an Apollonian world and gives them a week of pure Dionysian release. The Playa is a chaotic, spontaneous plane with minimal structure - it is the perfect offset to the default world.
The god of wine and dance demands his tribute of us too.
The Hyper-Reverent & The Hyper-Irreverent
Another duality I stumbled upon in my Playa sagas, is that Burning Man thrives on being simultaneously Hyper-Reverent and Hyper-Irreverent. Burners know not to take themselves too seriously, but also know that the Playa has actual magical power.
It’s hard to explain without being there yourself but in a moment of clarity a Burner can be Deep Playa crying at the beauty of something majestic or obscure while at the same time laughing at himself with the full self-awareness that he’s a 30-something professional on the outside with obligations, spending time rolling around crying-laughing in the dust. You are crying tears of joy and laughing at yourself in total ridicule all at once, pretty much all the time.
This is to say, Burners are actually self-aware, we know the cliches about Burners - and we choose to fall right into them anyway because it’s fucking hilarious and worth it.
In a moment, you can be so overwhelmed with love for the entire universe while at the same time laughing at how stupidly ridiculous a statement like that sounds. You are infinite and infinitesimal, it doesn’t matter, you learn to love and enjoy it and also realize how ridiculous it all is. It’s beautiful and so fucking stupid.
Burning Man is Fractal
A fractal is a never ending pattern that is similar at every increasing scale, it doesn’t repeat but it rhymes at every level. Burning Man is a giant fractal experience.
You’re in a giant art installation in Deep Playa. You lean into the wood and notice the granular details on some obscure barely seen portion of the work that the artist did anyway. You look around and notice how all the art pieces Deep Playa interplay nicely with each other and with the roaming art cars in orbit around the space. The early lights of Black Rock City glow on the horizon as a cohesive glistening picture. The sun is setting and the skylight against the mountain paints the most beautiful piece you’ve seen on your journey today.
You find a little fire at a camp and sit around and chat with your friends and some strangers. You sit alone at a fire. The entire Playa gathers to watch The Man burn. The entire Burner community burns the man every year.
You have a critical insight about yourself in a fleeting moment in a passing thought. You have a multi-hour conversation with a new friend and learn so much about each other. You spend a night out with a group of friends and learn something about them that you never realized. You spend the week with your camp and build bonds with people you will now know for many years into the future. You spend the next year getting ready to give more to this group than you would ever want for yourself. You shared a moment, a night, a week, a lifetime.
You feel love. You feel self-love for working to put yourself in that situation at that moment. You feel love for a friend, for a partner. You feel love for your group, your Playa wolf pack. You feel love for your camp. You feel love for the Burner community, for strangers in other camps that you know had a similar experience as you this week. You feel love for humanity for at least producing this, if nothing else.
The dust cakes on your face and in your hair. The dust cakes on your clothes and shoes and backpack. The dust cakes on your bike. The dust cakes on your tent and in your camp. The dust cakes all over your friend’s car. The dust cakes on the inside of you - and can’t be washed off.
House Music (Especially Deep Tribal House)
Bro, I saw Carl-fucking-Cox play a late night set, it was sooooo sick. I met this super hot girl at the show and she said he’s even better in Ibitha - my boy and I are prolly gonna go this spring, we both have the vacation days, you should totally come with us, we’re definitely going to hang out all the time in the outside world.
All the other stuff I mentioned is cool too, but the absolute best part is definitely the house music! Overall the shows together are probably almost as good as Coachella or EDC in any given year, but the artists are more random and experimental with their sets. I got to ride on Robot Heart last burn and that pretty much made my whole burn.
I like the other stuff I said too, but fuck I just love Tribal House soooo much dude.
PS - To all the virgins, make sure to catch the sunrise Daft Punk show at the trash fence, they play every year. It’s amazing and your Burning Man experience was fully wasted if you don’t go.
Honor the Playa.
Fuck Your Burn.
-Colin