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Comment by zasz | Hacker News Reader

I went in 2010 and one of the first people I met there was an advertising exec who said this event was the only time she felt alive. It was really sad.

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Why is that sad? She found something she enjoys doing. Better than someone who has yet to find that spark that gives life meaning.

Is everyone in the advertising business supposed to love making adverts?

I certainly feel more alive camping with friends than I do debugging JavaScript. I'm lucky enough to have a life where I can go on 2 or 3 major vacations a year with friends and family with another couple smaller trips spread throughout the year. For people with a busier schedule, I can see them taking great pleasure in the one time a year they get to escape.

Especially since so many people never get to escape. I know plenty of people who never have had a vacation, and may very well die without ever having a day off from work and life and stress.

If you're an advertising executive or a software developer and decide that you'd be happier living in the desert and making weird sculptures from scrap, that is very much an option. Living in a cabin in the woods or sailing around the world or establishing a commune for circus artists is a thing that you can do, and you don't need to be a millionaire to do it.

is it possible you have any tips on the circus commune?

wwoof + circus turns up something in oregon. Investigate if you're interested.

I don't think you know how expensive it would be to sail around the world. Especially if you'd like to do it somewhat comfortably.

Not necessarily

https://vimeo.com/15351476

Sailing around the Mediterranean, then selling your boat two years later and sailing around the Caribbean, then doing it again somewhere else is easily within the reach of middle-class finances.

Having a boat and crew large enough, comfortable and capable enough to sail the open ocean is really the hard part, but you can get most of the pleasure while avoiding that.

Someone I know well wanted to sail around the world. Learned to sail, and she got to know people with boats who needed crew to take shifts on their sailboards, and were headed somewhere interesting. Then she would repeat the process at the next port. There are also forums for connecting people in this manner. She always got food on board, and sometimes paid a stipend at the end of the trip. After a year and a half of adventure in dream locales I don't think she was out-of-pocket more than a four figure sum.

Certainty, and minimizing risk is expensive, but accepting the opposite can open up a lot of opportunities.

I've met a few people doing versions of this. It's definitely possible to sail round the world on 2-6 person boats and come back with more money than you started with.

You can't skip over the cost (both time and money) of learning to sail, though. It's not a cheap hobby, though you might get lucky and find someone to take you on for free.

You've fallen into the trap of believing that there's only one way of doing things - the preposterously expensive way that's promoted in lifestyle magazines.

How much does it cost to learn to sail? If you take a Yachtmaster Offshore course, it'll cost you somewhere in the region of $15,000. If you show up at any marina and look keen, someone in need of crew will take you on board and show you the ropes for free. Many people have sailed around the world at almost no cost by crewing on other people's boats.

How much does a sailing boat cost? A brand new 50 footer with all the trimmings will cost you upwards of $400,000. You can buy a rough little boat and properly fit it out for bluewater sailing for about $20,000. It'll be ugly, it'll be cramped, it'll have faded gelcoat and threadbare upholstery, but it'll safely take you across oceans. That's not a trivial sum of money, but it's well within reach of most skilled professionals. If you look after it, you'll be able to sell it for close to what you paid for it.

What are your other costs? Mainly food, running repairs and mooring fees. If you want to do everything in five-star luxury, expect to spend about $80,000 over the course of a circumnavigation. If you don't mind sleeping at anchor and eating from dented cans, you could easily circumnavigate for under $8,000 - less if you avoid the Panama Canal.

There's a widespread belief - particularly in America - that adventurous lifestyles are the exclusive domain of the gratuitously wealthy. The reality is very different, especially if you're young, childless and have marketable skills. Even if you're none of those things, your options are far wider than you might imagine as long as you're willing to think creatively and live modestly.

https://www.amazon.com/Voyaging-Small-Income-Annie-Hill/dp/1...

My dad bought a 22ft ketch rig for £28k and sold it about 6 years later for around £22k. It was in good condition, certainly nothing threadbare, but no luxury either. He had it around my late teen years, some of the best memories of my childhood were on that boat. So it cost about £1,000 / year split between 4 (2 adults 2 teenagers). Much better experiences than crappy beach holidays.

Living in a shed with basically no income works okay while you're relatively young and healthy. It really kills your chances of living comfortably when you're old and can't work on your potato patch anymore.

If you're a software developer or an advertising executive, you have a lot of options in terms of freelancing, consulting and remote employment. You have more choices than just conventional employment or voluntary destitution.

Better to feel alive one week per year than zero, I guess. What is she the other 51 though?

We're only - conscience? - for so long. It's sad if anyone laments that they only ever truly feel alive for ~2% of that time. If you want to feel alive, you don't need a major vacation or escape to do so. Or, at least, I posit that you don't. Do you not feel alive hanging out in the neighborhood park (or wherever) with your friends? Or does that feeling only come from a designated vacation campground?

FYI, you probably meant "conscious", as in mentally aware of the world. "Conscience" is your internal moral compass, which makes your sentence read as though people care less about right and wrong after a period of time. Which is it's own interesting idea...

Meaningfulness can and should be something you can create in daily life, not push off to some once-a-year event. It may not be something you feel 24/7, but surely someone can muster up some kind of really fascinating reality to create or explore at least on a daily basis. Crafting, the outdoors, weekly D&D sessions, all kinds of things offer all kinds of neat little worlds you can explore and be a part of something bigger.

One of the big reasons why gaming is as big as it is is because it provides that kind of larger-than-life atmosphere, pretty much on tap.

Its possible the event only feels meaningful merely because its only one week a year. If it were all the time if would be just "part of the daily grind."

That's what's sad about it. The daily grind should be meaningful in and of itself. But if you can't make that meaningful, then there should at least be another place you can go once a day where you do get that feeling.

Oh, I think it's a lot bigger than that. The woman was the leader of a known, established Burning Man camp. I'm pretty sure the friendships she developed there are more meaningful than the ones she has outside of Burning Man, and it's a bit sad the rest of her life doesn't give her the same social validation. I think we've failed a bit as a society if we can't give people what they need to feel happy on a _slightly_ more regular basis than once a year.

I don't know about this woman, but a lot of my current real-world social structure is currently comprised of people I met while forming a burning man camp around an art project. The fact that Burning Man ends each year does not negate these people or relationships from the world on some magical 51 week suspension.

Hopefully, you feel alive while working on your art project with them outside of the burn! Her camp doesn't center around a big art project, though, so that might be why she feels more limited.

Making the art was great, but honestly since then we mostly just get together to play board games or have potlucks. Most of us haven't even attended Burning Man for the last two or three years (though we still all go to a local regional burn together).

I think it's a bit arrogant for you to decide what should be meaningful for others.

I gave examples of things that could be found meaningful. But meaning is, of course, something that only the individual can find.

An advertising executive probably makes more than enough to not be an advertising executive if they so choose. You don't find it ironic that an advertising executive goes to Burning Man? Advertising, a cornerstone of late-stage capitalism? Sad really, because this person can pretend for a week that they aren't the ones making things worse.

The system directs the people, not the other way around. Ad execs aren't the cause of consumerism any more than consumers are; at this point it's a self perpetuating system. Blame the designers of that system of you feel the need to point the finger: Edward Bernays for starters.

I think it's sad because wouldn't you rather have a life when you could go camping whenever you want, if that was the thing that brought you the most joy?

I think capitalism is sad, I think society is sad. I think it's unnecessary. I think it's sad that in reading this sentiment, there will be people that will reflexively scoff at me for my communist, hippy ideals. "Happiness, you fool! You have to WORK for a living?" "You want communism, why don't you move to VIETNAM and tell me how it's working out!" I need to work to pay a cell phone bill and my world of warcraft subscription. I don't need to work to stay alive. I've gathered berries before, it's not so bad. As 3d printing and solar energy gathering/storage techs get better, the idea of "working" (generating value for your local billionaire) is going to become sillier and sillier.

I'm glad she's found a way to be alive one week out of fifty-two, but I'm sorry the other fifty-one weeks a year apparently suck that much!

IMHO we have enough resources that people shouldn't have to work bullshit jobs like being advertising execs if they don't want to. cf David Graeber's essay on bullshit jobs.

Luckily, this isn't all the attendees, but for the repeat ones, yeah. It is sad. They say things like they're "home" when they're at a burn, and they literally get depressed for a week back in the "default world".

The fact that these people seem completely incapable of understanding how to live the life they want more than 1 week a year is astounding. If you want to be naked, spin fire, drink and do drugs with your friends while listening to mixes of house and world music, get a back yard with a tall fence and go to town.

A lot of people work in order to live on their vacations.

This has to be one of the more depressive sentences I've read.

More and more I find myself being really glad that I work in software, where flexible working hours and companies that try to offer something to their employees (because there's actual competition) are more common than in many other fields I guess.

> They say things like they're "home" when they're at a burn, and they literally get depressed for a week back in the "default world".

That's probably the MDMA comedown, to be honest.

Not exactly. It's a different kind of chemical comedown, similar to what's called "drop" in the bdsm world. People get so excited about finally doing what they love with people who accept them, and then the actual excitement of doing those things spins off lots of natural chemical highs. When they have to leave they're both depressed in general that they have to leave those things/people behind, and then also have a drop off of those natural "high" chemicals. It's common for people who leave non-drug-related conferences or weekend-long parties to be affected by it, for up to a week or more.

Hey, at least she has one in her life. That's one more per year than most people.

I'm not trying to pick an argument, or imply most people are emotionally dead inside, but _come on_. You really gotta take an expression about enjoying an escaping from the humdrum of day-to-day life and use it to snark about a person's entire existence?

It wasn't intended to be snark. She was very clear that this one week was IT for her. She was a leader in an established Burning Man camp that hands out free stuff for women's health, and she said she really enjoyed the recognition she got for doing something nice for other people. At the time I thought she should look into doing volunteer work with some worthy organization the rest of the year, but now, I see that finding a satisfying community to give value to isn't so easy. What's sad is that for all the technological progress this society has made, it has failed to provide people with consistent opportunities to feel that they are doing psychologically meaningful work.

I love this story. It captures my experiences there.

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