Is it time to call time-out? From the New York Post:
Going to Burning Man is a middle-age cry for help
Next time you spy drug-blasted people bicycling through Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, wearing tutus and little else, don’t be envious. They’re invariably at Burning Man, the annual pop-up festival which runs from Aug. 28 through Sept. 5 — and are probably miserable with themselves.
Sure, it looks fun to spend a few days enjoying a gift economy, listening to techno, cooling off in refrigeration trucks and gawking at surreal sculptures or taking in offbeat performance art. But, according to Daniel Yudkin, a social psychology Ph.D. candidate at New York University, as reported by Quartz, the eight days of decadent hedonism provide once-a-year opportunities for attendees to experience bona fide connections with others. All the other non-Burning days of their lives? Not so much.
Rather than reflecting how much fun Burning Man is, the reality of people spending thousands of dollars — on travel, accommodations, tickets and drugs — serves as proof that their non-Burner days are pathetically empty. “I think the fact that people invest so much of their own resources and time and energy to going to Burning Man suggests that there’s something missing, that there’s something Burning Man fulfills for them that they don’t get in day-to-day life,” Yudkin says.
The Millennials, they are ruining it for everyone... Sigh... Of course, our generation could have raised them better but we were to busy following our bliss.
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