Comment by mgce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgce | Hacker News Reader

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Bringing Burning Man's inspiration into real life is one of the great outcomes of the experience. It gives me and many people I know much greater confidence in being open, giving and playful toward friends and strangers in the real world when we get back. It's really neat to bring out moments of spontaneous interaction and smiles, i.e. simple moments of raw human connection, in interactions that would normally be met with people buried in their cell phones, avoiding eye contact, and basically doing anything possible to avoid having to acknowledge their fellow human beings.

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.

That's because community in the real world is hard. It shouldn't be, but it is.

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.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding what I and others are saying.

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.

Nobody's cowering from the difficulty; many of us go to Burning Man precisely because we are strongly motivated to invest in community-building, and the combination of a challenging physical environment and a wide-open social environment make it a great place to exercise and improve our skills. People very commonly come back and build interesting new community organizations in the "real world" using the skills and connections they've developed through their trips to Burning Man.

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.

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