Every year burning man is a new experience, and every year I discover new things about both others and myself. This year has been no exception.

I went into the burn after a period of extended travel. I’ve been travelling continuously since February, and while there have been some trips back home since that time, they’ve been short. As we’ll see, this ended up having a significant impact on my mental state while getting dusty.

In the past I’d put a lot of thought, planning, and often worry into my Burning Man trip. This year that wasn’t the case; I’d been before, I knew what to expect, I had a camp and transport and gear. Of course there were some stressful moments beforehand, but I skipped out on the weeks or months of long term planning and worry that I would normally experience. This sounds like a lovely, stress-free experience, but as we’ll see it wasn’t the best way for me to approach the burn.

When I finally arrived on playa, I was already terribly homesick. Because I had dropped into the burn after so much continuous travel, I hadn’t given much thought as to what I’d like to get out of the burn. While those plans never go as expected, I usually enter with broad goals and plans, and just having those gives me a better mental framework with which to work inside the event.

Consequently, I fell into my old routine. I went to the same places as previous burns. I did the same things. Seeking out experiences and events that one enjoyed in the past is very human behaviour, and in the absence of anything better usually works pretty well. However because these were things I had experienced before, my routine ended up feeling routine. I wasn’t appreciating things, I wasn’t connecting with people, and I continued to feel homesick. This was amplified by the fact that some of my favourite campmates weren’t at the burn this year.

I was seriously worried I was turning into a grumpy old burner. That somehow Burning Man had lost its magic for me, and worse still I may even have a negative impact on other people’s experiences.

Luckily, there was a telephone booth with a direct line to God just across the street from our camp. Being able to call God directly for advice is certainly one of the advantages of Burning Man. We had a nice chat, I checked to make sure God didn’t need a beer delivery, because I know being God is sometimes thirsty work. God was good on beer, and gave me advice which could be summed up simply as “love”.

I didn’t properly understand God’s message until I sought out my friend Claire, who has many more burns under her belt, and always gives great advice. We met one year in the Muggle world, when she snuck me into a Harry Potter convention in Portland. I found Claire sitting on a dusty street corner, alternatively applying her face painting talents, and heckling passers-by to grab some clothes from her yard sale. Sometimes she’d get up and literally throw clothes at people if they dared express that their current clothes were sufficient. People who didn’t stop would still get “I fucking love you” shouted at them through a static-filled megaphone.

Watching Claire in action was pretty amazing, and she wasn’t giving two shakes of dust as to what was happening elsewhere at the burn. Her advice was likewise direct and insightful:

“Do what you fucking love, even if they’re the things you’d do at home. If you want to read a book at Burning Man, then read a book at Burning Man. Don’t worry about art or experiences, or what you should be doing. Don’t care about what anyone else says. Don’t worry if you’re doing it wrong, or even if you’re doing it right. Just do what you fucking love.”

Up until this point, I had been trying to do Burning Man things, like art or interaction, and I wasn’t really feeling it. So I resolved to do what I loved. And that’s knowledge. I sought out scientists, and science talks, and people who have a love of learning. Rather than watching things burn on the playa, I got to discuss adding completely new and synthetic base pairs to DNA, and then encoding for completely new and synthetic amino acids using those modifications.

I found friends from near and far who have a love of stories, and both heard and recited some grand tales. I went and hung out in the library. I spoke about humanitarian projects and open source in tea houses. I went to lectures on taking an engineering and quantified self approach and applying it to consciousness. I ignored all the things one’s “supposed” to do at burning man, and instead did all the things I wanted to do. And it was glorious.

What’s more, this experience reaffirmed something I’d just been starting to figure out about myself. I do a lot of things that seem exceptional, and while I may have enjoyed them once, they’ve now become part of my routine. Travel is the obvious one here; right now I so very much want to be at home, and so I’m going to do exactly that. Yes, I’m missing some conferences. Yes, I’m going to miss some opportunities. But I don’t care, because I’ll be doing what I love.

~ Paul