Burning Man is a phenomenon and a cult. Think what you want, but it is indisputable that its cultural impact is substantial. If you were to measure just by the quality of writing it inspired, that on its own would justify it (at least to me).
My own Burning Man experience wasn’t quite as bad as that. But it came close.
The set up for the line above is way above what you would expect from writing online, and definitely has literary quality. It’s too long to reproduce here, so go and read it.
Suddenly I wanted very badly to get out of London, this grey piggledy city mouldering through its last decades of decline. Suddenly I was acutely aware that life is short, very short, and most of it happens while you’re not really paying attention. I had a strong need to do all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally do. How absurd that we only ever get to be one person. Maybe I should try being a football fan. Maybe I should start going clubbing again. Become a gym bro. Completely reverse all my political opinions. Pilot light aircraft. Join a gang, splash my opps on the 37 bus. But of everything I could imagine, there was probably nothing more foreign to the person I’d become than Burning Man.
He and Pollock were very interested in their own mental processes. When they weren’t talking about maths they were often saying things like I noticed you spontaneously strike up a conversation with Sandra over there, what was going on internally and cognitively that prompted you to do this? Later, I found Pollock lying in the dust in the depths of an intense LSD trip. He said he was having fantastic insights into his own decision-making process. Yes, I said, but what about the world? What about everything else? What’s the motor behind human history? Why do empires rise and fall?
The irony of this piece is that the author was hired (travel and expenses payed) to go to Burning Man, and most he has to say about it is very critical. Look:
Tiffany had a data labelling startup. Data labelling is where you toss pennies at impoverished people in the Third World so they’ll spend all day looking at pictures of dogs, saying ‘that’s a dog.’ This information is then used to train the autonomous AI killer drones that will be hunting them like animals before the next decade.
This was an interesting place to not be on drugs.
Qualifies as a great opening line.
For more great (OG) writing on Burning Man: Beyond Belief by Erik Davis.