Done With Burning Man

I'm officially done with Burning Man. Until I'm not :).

It's become blase, and it burns (pun intended) way too much of my energy and vacation time to at all be worth it.

Everyone seems to work really hard for little benefit. I feel like we're all in a work camp where we are fed propaganda, trance-like alterations from watching various important symbols burn, and a variety of substances, which we ourselves are convinced to pay for, to make us work as hard as we can. OK, so the last part (at lease illegally) doesn't apply to me, but the point is valid in general.

Well, it's either a work camp or a grand experiment to see how much time, money, and hard work can be extracted from people who are otherwise in general very well off and don't work as hard at their real jobs.

Imagine if that kind of energy can be harnessed for the cause of *good*.

Burning Man "jumped the shark" for me when I heard the story (over BMIR - Burning Man Informational Radio) of how a woman had lost her camera, and another person looked through the photos, and from those photos deduced the camp that woman was in, found them and handed it back to her. This woman who got her camera back recounted this story and ended with, "Only here would such kindness happen."

First of all, I don't think it's kindness to look through someone's personal photos, and, second, I hear such stories of kindness every day in the "outer world". I'm sure for every one I hear, there's about 100,000 such acts of kindness that go on without my knowledge.

Seriously, only at Burning Man would someone think that kindness only happens at Burning Man. Since most burners are from the Bay Area, I wonder if any acts of kindness happen there at all.

No more Burning Man for me. Perhaps I'll go in 2012, with the sole purpose of working as little as possible. That'll show "The Man".