Burning Man is Stupid, Hypocritical, and Irresponsible

Or: On the life-giving power of alternative spaces

If you’ve been reading for a while, this post is going to be a bit different. While I can never put down the Zen frame completely, a friend asked me to write something about Burning Man a little bit less contemplative and more squarely addressing the rain soaked, breathlessly covered, wild ride that was Burning Man 2023. Given the rains and its effects on the event, a lot of the news coverage was generally negative (in various flavors), and I figure that would be a good place to start a response.

First things first… Burning Man is dumb. Stupid. Ridiculous. I’ve literally said “Burning Man is stupid” about 5 times a day, everyday, at each of the 10 times I’ve been to the event. At a personal level, it’s so damn physically uncomfortable, trying to be festive in an area so aggressively inhospitable to life. The preparation to fun ratio is nutty (I’m still unpacking, cleaning, and storing, more than week after the event ended). Each day is a battle against dehydration, covered in dust with pH levels that eat at your skin.

Zooming out, Burning Man and everything involved with it is most certainly bad for the environment. It’s deeply hypocritical, as attendees buy mass amounts of supplies and trinkets from Amazon to leave no trace, be self reliant, and exist outside of the economic system for a week.

From a conventional social perspective, Burning Man is irresponsible, hypocritical, and stupid.

I’m also going to go back next year.

In the media coverage that played on these tropes, perspective is rarely if ever offered. Let’s examine irresponsibility in 2023, just from the lens of climate. Do you eat meat? Fly on a plane for vacation? Drive a car? Buy stuff on Amazon? Gauging from the way most people I know eat, travel, and consume, most of us engage in our lives blind to the reality of climate change.

I don’t write that from a position of superiority - from time to time, I do each of those things myself. I try to stay in conscious relationship with the impact of my actions, but I also do a lot of things that a sane, cool-headed person would rightfully argue are crazy in light of the existential threat that climate change represents.

I write this to start from an important premise: it’s not just Burning Man - we live in a society that is irresponsible, hypocritical, and stupid. Starting with irresponsibility, we’re going full speed into a climate crisis driven by carbon emissions that we’ve known about for decades and are barely doing anything to address, personally or as communities or countries. 

Our societal hypocrisy isn’t hard to spot: while countries’ constitutions espouse all sorts of ideals, our societies are barely concealed exploitation of the poor by the rich. This occurs within each country as well as internationally, with the so-called “developed” world essentially subjugating huge swaths of the population of the “developing” world to wage slavery, working the vast majority of their waking hours to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite for consumption of the global rich (which almost certainly includes you).

And most painfully obvious at places like Burning Man, the conventional world is just so stupid, even if we’re lucky enough to be part of this global rich class. We’re almost all caught up in the rat race of acquiring and consuming in one way or another - and while the effects of this on the world are apparent, it’s not even making us happy! Stress, anxiety, and depression continue to skyrocket and contentment isn’t correlated with wealth beyond median income. 

Burning Man is an absurd event located within a much more absurd world. The fact that the vast majority of people who go to Burning Man fall in love with it should encourage us to look more deeply at it and learn from what it’s doing right rather than fixate on what’s wrong. It catalyzes people feeling alive, connected, and inspired - and the world I dream about is full of people feeling that way far more often than they do today.

(I don’t have statistics for that claim, but I’ve seen hundreds of people go for their first time in our camp over more than 10 years, and it feels like <5% of them have a bad time and aren’t deeply moved by the event.)

Let’s look at 2023 with this lens. For most of the people I’ve spoken with, the rains made Burning Man 2023 their favorite iteration of the event. 

The rains brought out and reinforced immediacy and interdependence. It shrunk the experience away from consumption and tourism (of whatever sort - from fancy dinners for billionaires to massive concerts) to simply being with, supporting, and merrymaking with the people around us. Our camp, bathrooms and neighbors grew in importance as the glitz and glamor faded - and perhaps not so surprisingly, our experience was elevated.

In activist circles, you hear “solidarity” and “mutual aid” all the time - at Burning Man this year, while many attendees had never encountered those phrases, they lived them, brought them to life, in a way that I know would make the activists in my life proud. Community is a world that gets thrown around a lot, but Burning Man is an opportunity to live and experience it in a way that’s nearly impossible to recreate in the default world (this year even more so).

Is everyone communally minded there? Is it a utopian paradise? Of course not! The spirit of mutuality and the 10 principles of Burning Man are counter to the core values of the default world, and we internalize the default world every day we live in it, to one degree or another. Self-centeredness is certainly on display at Burning Man every year. Each of us embodies it in small ways, and we’ve all read the stories about the rich and famous who go only to set up exclusive, fancy situations for themselves (or bail out when the rains start).

But the longer one goes to Burning Man - the more it becomes a ritual or practice than a vacation - the more deeply people seem to crave, encounter, and embody community and service, to one degree or another (whether it’s making art, volunteering, or anything else). 

The reason I love Burning Man is that it’s an alternative space with life-giving principles within a world in which the default way of being generally squeezes the life out of us. If you’re a regular reader, you know about my Zen practice and how I spend a lot of time at Zen Mountain Monastery - to me, sesshin (the traditional weeklong meditation retreat practiced in the Zen tradition) and Burning Man are two sides of the same coin. That coin is a container of time and space that holds the possibility of practicing, experiencing, and expressing our deepest being - who we really are underneath our conditioning, our learned ways of living in the modern world. They are not sustainable as permanent realities or ways of life, but they’re opportunities for both inner and outer exploration that is impossible in regular daily reality.

Again, I’m definitely not saying Burning Man is perfect (see: the first 3 paragraphs of this essay). But we often forget how much the default world is an irresponsible world. It’s irresponsibly led and lived. We all co-create it, but for those of us that want to change it, it’s hard to understand how to go about doing so. 

I believe if we are truly interested in creating a world that gives and supports life (physically, emotionally, spiritually), we need these types of experiments in ways of being, expressing, and existing together, in whatever form they take. Yes, I wish lots of aspects of the event were different, but I’m profoundly grateful that it exists, and I’m hungry for us to create more principles-based alternative spaces in which we can explore what it means to live, create, and be. Spaces and events like Burning Man catalyze the sort of radical imagination and solidarity we’ll need to navigate the coming crises that will inevitably arise out of our societal irresponsibility. 

Because it’s not just that we need to solve climate change or lift the poor out of poverty or address any single issue - we need to imagine a different way of sustaining our lives and being with each other that’s actually better than the status quo. The default world primary value of consumption doesn’t actually make us happy. What we need is an economy, government, and society that does.

We need to experience that, for most of us, it’s actually more fun (and there’s more depth of the variety we crave) to take a week to create and dance and laugh and cry and be in community than it is to, for example, go on a European vacation to consume the culture as an outsider. 

I write this knowing that there are issues and perspectives of class, race, gender, accessibility, and others that I’m missing, and that Burning Man is problematic in ways that I not just didn’t touch on but today don’t even perceive. But I also hope that a spirit of possibility is conveyed, a contextualization of the event that points to how those of us interested in a better world might continue to build alternative spaces where we can explore different ways of living, creating, and expressing ourselves.

Finally, I’m taking time away from a 9-5 to see if I can make a living more aligned to my values (by doing things like writing). If you want to support my writing, snag a “Sock Bag Sock” shirt I made (IYKYK) and buy one for a friend. You can expect a return to more Zen- and inner work-themed writings over the next few weeks, and I’ll likely continue to share about Burning Man, IFS/parts work (which has been really alive for me), and more.