Every individual I've ever met who went to burning man was irritating, broke, begging for money, and full of "good" business ideas that were either "stolen" by huge megacorporations or just straight up idiotic business ideas "that would totally work if people weren't so close minded."
Whatever. My experience is anecdotal, and I'm not going to judge 8000 people based on my interactions with a couple of dozen.
Wait, no, that's not true. I'm totally judging all of them. You want a real human experience with unsanity and sharing and creativity and ugliness and real human stuff and burning things?
Go home to where you live. Be poor there. Hell, be moderately wealthy there.
Look, I'm about as in favor of arts and philosophy as a person can be. I spent 20 years as a professional violinist before I got in to technology. I spent years teaching music theory and history. Now that I have a better living as a developer, I volunteer for a dance company in Brooklyn, and I run an El Sisteme program in the Philippines with my brother.
I get it. There are more important things in the world than material wealth, and exploring yourself and other people in a non-traditional way is valuable.
But this is ridiculous. There are better and more honest ways to do this than burning man.
BM pisses me off because it's a waste of resources. All those people in the desert doing whatever it is they do is person-power that could be directed at a worthy cause that could accomplish the same thing.
Aside from my volunteer work I write 8 checks a year, for a thousand bucks a piece. I give them explicitly to the kinds of orgs that I don't work with on a daily or weekly basis. I give my time to orgs I know and love and care about. I give my money to those that I don't.
You want to do something good for you? You want to find out who you truly are? You want confidence to know that you're doing okay? You want to find out if your ideas have legs?
Spend a day with the homeless. Go to a foreign country and teach their poor what you already know.
Spend your Burning Man money on something that is worthwhile and will actually teach you something about yourself and your fellow man.
I really, really, really strongly despise Burning Man people. You don't actually want good for yourself or for others; you just want to feel like you are good to yourself and others.
Fuck you, I hate you all.
I hope that a hater on HN has now ruined burning man.
The best and most intellectually honest thing BM could do right now is shut the whole thing down. Burn it down.
But that will never happen. And we all know why. BM is a business now.
Businesses never commit suicide. Only people do. Maybe think about that the next time you want to go to burning man. Just sit on a phone waiting for someone who has a problem that's so bad he or she wants to end it.
None of you will ever do that because you are extreme and insane narcissists.
We are fucked. We live in a world where it's sort of okay for David Foster Wallace to kill himself, but it's also okay for idiots to go to burning man to "find" shit.
To put it the way the kids do: "I can't even . . ."