For the past 4 months, I’ve been going to ‘Burner’ events fairly regularly. Not Burning Man itself, but the parties and shows put on by the people who like to make regular life as close to Burning Man as possible — the Sunset Campout’s, the DirtyBird shows, How Weird, the innumerable off-beat parties at Monarch or Public Works or Temple or Madrone or American Steel. Growing up in the East Bay, we made forays into the warehouse-rave scene as teenagers in the early naughts (although I’m told by older folks that the real, underground scene of the 90s was already dead by then), but we had always done so as outsiders, scoffing at the mid-20-to-30 crowd all geeked out on ecstasy with their silly outfits, their PLUR bracelets, their lollypops and their techno pants. The rave culture seemed so foreign back then…a pastime for a group of people fundamentally different from us: square adults with jobs, ‘weekend warriors’, people who preferred the amphetamine pulse of house music to the slumping bass-lines of our Bay Area Gangster Rap. Our interest in raves was purely scientific; we came to observe, not to participate.

But then I grew up and went away to college, didn’t come back for 8 years, and I returned to a Bay Area as radically different as I was. Where once the tech-class was confined to San Francisco, a new contingent of people has been popping up in East Bay as rent in the city climbs higher and higher. This new population is one I can blend in with easily (aesthetically speaking), but it was hard to do that at first without feeling like I was somehow betraying my local tribe. No one in San Francisco is actually from the city anymore; why would I want to cavort around with these outsiders? In a way, hanging out with these domestic emigrés felt a bit like fraternizing with the enemy.

But I got over that. Nowadays you’d think SF has always been a tech-city, that it magically sprang into existence from some primordial ooze with the first internet boom in ’99. There’s no one left who remembers the hardships of the crack epidemic, or the bohemian nature of the city pre-computer days; the legacy left by Kerouac & Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti & Snyder, Garcia & Owsley, Hammett & Frost, Fogarty & Santana, Chavez & Milk. But that’s fine. The truth is, while all the new folks may have no sense of how gritty & inspired it once was here (nor care, for that matter), they’re mostly intelligent, hard-working, friendly people. The San Francisco this new population knows is a nice, safe, forward-thinking, technological paradise, and they act accordingly. They’re trying to create a new legacy, and it’s one of innovation, adaptation, and bustling commerce. Why scowl & mutter like a jealous ex-lover when I can go see what these cats are all about? I share this space with these new folks now, why not try to make friends?

So I have been. For the past 4 months, I’ve been forcing myself out of my comfort zone and going out to these parties with a group of self-described ‘Burners’. I’ve put on the costumes, I’ve taken all the drugs, I’ve lazed around in ‘cuddle-puddles’, I’ve danced my ass off to throbbing synth lines, I’ve had the promiscuous sex, I’ve ’kept it going’ in after-hours ketamine and nitrous dens for multiple days, I’ve woken up more times than I can remember bitterly cursing the name of whoever invented glitter. I feel like I’ve been soaking in this scene long enough to have gained some insight. I finally feel that I can make some assessments about what I’ve seen.

While Burning Man was originally started by artists, at these functions, I’ve yet to meet a single artist. Everyone seems to be high-performing enough: lots of engineers, developers, hackers, lawyers, entrepreneurs — if not executives of some nature, at least people who are high enough up in their organizations to have job responsibilities that sound important and demanding. Usually in their 30s, the demographic appears to be more young professionals than burnouts or slackers. Mind you, this is a specific sub-section of partygoer I’m talking about. You’ll find all kinds of people at a large event; a good time is a good time! The fratty guys in the Marina will throw on a head-dress and drop some acid at Treasure Island Music Festival, the construction worker decked out in Warriors regalia will get loose next to the bespectacled Mainframe Architect at Outside Lands. Drag-queens and hood-dudes will share blunts at Pride. Every shade of human being will mingle with one another at Bay to Breakers…the large, inexpensive festivities bring everyone together, and it’s great!

But there’s the kind of people who will party hard once a month, and there’s the kind of people who party hard 4 or 5 times a week, the people who make attending these events a lifestyle. I’ve been spending time with the later, and it’s this group that seems to me to be populated by 30-something yuppies who are using this perpetual party-consumption as a stand-in for a fundamental deficit of some sort….Why do you feel the need to go out every night? Why do you need to put on a costume? Why do you need to take drugs at every event? Why do you think it’s a good idea to bring your baby to a show? I understand that it’s fun, but why does life always need to be SO fun? Why does ‘all good things in moderation’ somehow not apply here?

Because there’s such a wealth of events for and by the people who want to live in an Eternal Burning Man world, from the outside, it almost seems like a legitimate lifestyle. If I were less cynical, I might declare it a triumphant return to the hippy heydays of the city, young people doing away with convention to interact and connect with each other in a new, better way; a celebration of life and defiance of authority, an obsessive devotion to expanding your consciousness that recalls Bill Graham’s LSD parties of the 1960s. From a distance, it might seem like the geist of San Francisco is alive and well in this new breed of citizen, idealists and dreamers who are circumventing the old models and traditions and building something new in it’s stead; the logical social-extension for a city whose business mantra is supposedly ‘disruption, disruption, disruption’.

But I’m cynical as fuck, so I don’t see any of that. The hippies didn’t work for corporations, the hippies didn’t have disposable incomes to buy elaborate costumes, to go to parties every night, to afford designer psychostimulants and prescription drugs. The hippies weren’t blowing off steam between 50–60 hr work-weeks of sitting behind a computer or talking on the phone. The hippies didn’t have to take Xanex to get them through their day, they didn’t have to take Ambien every night to fall asleep…what I see when I look at the live-to-party crowd is people who are lacking a solid identity, or are unhappy with the identity they have outside of the party; people who need to wear costumes and face-paint to be interesting, people that need to take drugs to be able to connect with others.

And I wouldn’t be writing this if the limitless hedonism was presented that way — as a catharsis from the horrible monotony and pressure of life in the hyper-capitalist working world we inhabit — but that’s almost never how it’s framed. Go talk to a Burning Man evangelist and you’ll hear all this stuff about how incredible, how different, how special, how unique and open and loving this sub-culture is. That’s mostly bullshit; people who love something will find a way to imbue their interest with some profound quality that justifies their obsessive consumption of it. You see it everywhere, from coffee enthusiasts to sports fanatics; it’s nothing unique to Burning Man-goers. The most legitimate defense of this excessive partying — and the most honest one — is that it’s a lot of fun.

But novel things lose their luster the more common they become. I have to wonder, how much of this lifestyle is actually about having fun, and how much of it is just fashionable consumption? When we go out with friends, imbibe substances, interact with strangers, dance to music we all like, it’s a gestalt experience, with all of those elements interacting together to make it fun — but any of those things individually can be fun too; we combine all of them together to ENHANCE the experience. When it’s necessary that ALL of those conditions be met in order to enjoy oneself, the party itself becomes the object. Once that happens we’re no longer talking about experiential activity, we’re talking about the same run-of-the-mill consumerism and ritualized object-dependence that defines our modern age. You’re no different than old men who drink Pabst and watch ’The Big Game’ together at the bar every weekend, or the pre-menopausal women who drink a few bottles of Pinot Grigio at lunch 3x a week and gossip about the PTA.

There also seems to be a pervasive idea in the community that this type of partying is somehow fundamentally different, that it’s somehow more ‘enlightened’ than going out to the bars and getting drunk every weekend. Underpinning this attitude is the subconscious belief that because artists started this tradition, participating in the pageantry somehow gifts you with the qualities of being creative, or artistic, or interesting, even if you can’t point to anything tangible in your life that supports that — ESPECIALLY if you can’t point to anything that supports this idea you may have about yourself: the you as a creative individual that’s stuck working in software, or sales, or marketing. Someone who has always had a novel or an album or a great work inside of them, but has had that artistic sensibility stifled by the demands of daily life.

Here’s the result of that class being forced into industry: in 2016, you don’t HAVE to make art to be creative and unconventional. You can throw on a fur coat and some Willy-Wonka glasses and go ride your bike on the Playa for a week. You can post photos of yourself doing that to Facebook and everyone will know how offbeat and eccentric you are. If that doesn’t fill your cup, you can attend all these functions during the rest of the year with other people who also feel like artists, but can’t suffer the uncertainty and strife of an artist’s life. If you participate, you get to be unique…just like everybody else.

So, let’s call it what it is, guys. It’s mindless hedonism, just with more colorful backdrops and cooler music and more beautiful, indulgent people than other scenes. The participants might be like-minded, the context might be unusual, the experience might be fun, but ultimately it’s just as devoid of meaning and authenticity as any other base form of release. Maybe in the beginning it was genuine, maybe once it WAS a bold statement against the status quo, had real meaning beyond the Instagram pics or Facebook posts culled from it, but that time has passed. When I stop to look around me at these functions, I don’t see ‘cool’ and ‘different’. I see an ocean of scared and lonely people trying their hardest to forget about that fact that they’re scared and lonely, patting themselves on the back for doing such a good job of faking it.

Why this is troubling to me is because there’s a facade of community, free-spirit, collectivity, open-mindedness, and acceptance, but it seems to be propped up entirely by drugs and spectacle. Those ‘enlightened’ values are a farce, which is partly why many people find Burners insufferable; the smug, condescending attitude that’s deployed when talking to those not ‘in the scene’ is based on an illusion. If you take the drugs and the costumes out of the picture, how many people would still be at these events every night? Pretending that there’s something more to this rampant party culture than simple escapism, or collective self-destruction, makes it easier for people to vindicate their continued consumption of it. Instead of facing their own personal problems in a healthy, mature way, they can go hang out with the crew, and there’s always some drugs to take, some cute girls/guys to take them with, some DJ spinning sick tracks in a warehouse, or a boat, or a park, or a BART train. It disguises addiction, enables it. It masks anxiety, distorts the perception of people and yourself…there are people I’ve met who have partied together for years who don’t even know each other’s last names. Outside of the party context, everyone’s meaningless to one another.

There’s a bigger conversation to be had here about the bourgeois nature of this sub-culture, the economy that enables these parties to be bigger and better every year, the socioeconomic status of the attendees, the commodification of art in general, but I’m not equipped to interrogate all that. It does irk me a little that my middle class brethren tend to face their problems solitarily, and the well-paid tech-class across the water gets to forget about theirs by partying-it-out together. I don’t want to go down that road, though. I know life isn’t fair, I don’t begrudge anyone anything.

I’m aware not everyone who partakes in the Burning Man lifestyle is a degenerate. I know plenty of people frequent the scene and are nothing at all like I’m describing. From what I’ve seen, though, enough of the people at these weekly functions are, and I wanted to write this because I could never tell the friends that have generously escorted me into this world this to their face, but it’s how I feel. I wish they’d slow down. I wish they’d take a step back and examine their behavior, ask themselves what’s lacking in their real lives that compels them to try and live in Narnia. I wish they could see that, without solid people who actually care about them, this whole thing is fundamentally empty and worthless; a revamped Dolce Vida for the internet-age.

Whatever though. This is just my unsolicited 2 cents. I’m sure I won’t be changing many minds with this one. The bon vivants will continue to worship at the alter of Dionysus, the curmudgeons like me will continue to find imperfections in paragons. At the end of the day, you have to do what makes you happy in this life; if that means nuking your braincells in a Charizard onesie 3-times a week, go gangbusters. The world is going to shit quicker than I can keep up with, I suppose we should fill our last days with hollow pleasure….just don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing anything more than that.

See you guys at Breakers!