I was first invited to Burning Man in 2005. My friend Loretta went the year before and had the time of her life. She had a threesome with an older married couple and maintained the relationship. They gifted her use of their ski house in Telluride for her birthday the following winter. A bunch of us dancers flew out there to celebrate. The house was spectacular, right on the mountain. You could ski out the door. Loretta’s birthday was epic that year.

“You gotta come with me Suzanne,” Loretta urged. “Burning Man is amazing. Everyone is so well educated, so free spirited. You’ll love it.”

And it did sound amazing. I was on board with the concept of radical self-reliance. I’d put myself through Columbia with zero family support. And I’d been living as a single woman in Manhattan since I was 24, also with zero family support. I could live in an RV with a bunch of people for a long weekend. I could carry my weight, do my share of the chores. I wasn’t one to make costumes but Loretta said she’d help me with that.

I was also on board with the free wheeling vibe of Burning Man. Monogamy felt confining. Sexual norms in general felt confining and I’d already done some experimentation in that area. By 2005, I’d also had some wonderfully powerful experiences with drugs. I was 19 the first time I tried MDMA and it was the first time I understood that other people saw the world differently. Until then, I thought the way I saw things was the way things actually were. MDMA changed my life. We called it ecstasy back then and for good reason. It’s an empathy drug and the experience was indeed ecstatic.

Burning Man sounded like a valuable life experience. But it also sounded exhausting. “I don’t know Loretta, “ I said. “A week in the desert doing drugs? That’s too much.”

I was working as a stripper. I did enough drugs in my normal life. On vacation, I wanted to practice healthy habits. I’d recently discovered the Guanacaste Peninsula in Costa Rica. It’s one of the world’s Blue Zones. Life is so healthy there, people regularly live past 100. The waves were calling me. The desert was not.

Loretta invited me every year for several years. And each time I declined. “Can’t I just helicopter in for a day or two?” I’d joke. I was curious, but not curious enough to commit. Over the years, other friends went to Burning Man as well. But I never joined them. Still, I had respect for this counter culture event where they literally burned The Man. I figured I’d go at some point.

Unfortunately, I waited too long. In a disturbing New York Times article, I learned how the billionaire founder of Cirque du Soleil hired a team of low-paid Mexican laborers to build a lavish camp for him and his guests. The laborers were housed in simple canvas tents nearby. Burning Man is over, I thought. I missed it. The Man may have been symbolically burned, but in practice, he’d taken over the festival for himself.

Customers at the pricey gentlemen’s club I worked in started going. “Are you good at making costumes?” I asked a McKinsey consultant who’d recently attended the event.

“Oh, I just buy them in San Francisco, “ he admitted. I thought the whole point was to make the costumes yourself, with your particular camp. But of course, he didn’t have time for that.

“What do you like most about Burning Man?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate. His answer was right on the tip of his tongue. “A guy at the playa will give you the shirt off his back.”

I live in that world I thought to myself. I regularly give people the shirt off my back. And I’ve had people do the same for me. But clearly, not everyone practices this. I guess when you work with people who would advise Purdue Pharma to maximize sales of OxyContin, maybe a week of altering your brain chemistry in the desert heat is what it takes to behave like a decent human being, to feel a bond with your fellow man and lend him a hand.

By this time, I’d personally lost interest in ever attending Burning Man. But I saw the value for people like my McKinsey customer.

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After a while, the whole thing started to sound ridiculous.

A friend who works as a personal chef booked jobs at Burning Man in the years leading up to the pandemic. He’d charge $40,000 for his service. It was an easy gig. Half the food he schlepped out there would end up in the trash, uneaten. His clients weren’t interested in food. They were high on drugs. The most challenging part of his job was looking a female client in the eye while she addressed him topless or even totally nude.

Just this summer, I met a guy at a party who flirted with me by showing off his Burning Man costumes on Instagram. “My camp spends 11 months each year preparing for the festival,” he said, proudly. “I just attend Zoom meetings and give money. With my job, I don’t really have time to do the work myself.” This guy mentioned that he worked as a scientist but didn’t say anything else about it. He was more interested in showing off his Instagram to my friend and me. He did this for a really long time. Then he asked for my number before skipping off to some other party with his crew.

“What do you think of that guy?” My friend asked.

“Well, he’s definitely handsome and definitely into his outfits,” I chuckled.

“Don’t you think he talked too much about himself? Don’t you think he should’ve asked a bit about you?”

So I’ve never attended Burning Man myself….

But I’ve seen how its spirit has devolved over time. It’s not about self-reliance. It’s about paying others to do your work. It’s about getting that cool photo for Instagram. Doing Burning Man right has become prohibitively expensive. The event attracts too many bullshitters, too many posers. Ugh.

And right now, as I write this, those posers are stuck in the mud. They’ve been ordered to shelter in place, to conserve food and water. The latrines have not been emptied. There will be sanitation issues. Some may get sick. Internet service is spotty. Only emergency vehicles can navigate the thick mud. Many have made the arduous, 6-mile hike out of there. They say the mud felt like cinder blocks on their feet. Many who remain are trying to make the best of it. They’re creating mud sculptures. Dancing in the rain.

But there’s real suffering going on out there. It sounds like a refugee camp. Some attendees’ shelters have flooded. And it’s cold at night. Temperatures get down to 50°. I’m sure some people feel scared.

Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. The rains could’ve come at any time. But they came at the exact moment some of the most privileged tech minds, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs have gathered —fully stocked with hallucinogens.

I can’t wait to see what comes of this.

Suffering softens hearts. It creates compassion and engenders empathy. Maybe huddled together in RVs and flimsy shelters under punishing rains attendees will imagine what it’s like to be a real refugee, raising children in camps, and caring for the elderly in makeshift communities. Maybe they’ll feel inspired to help. Maybe right now, the very people with great talent and resources are hunkered down and imagining solutions to our world’s biggest problems. Maybe my scientist friend is thinking more about others at this moment than his abs. Just maybe.

Mother Nature is speaking to some of our best and brightest right now. Mother Nature is speaking to us at Burning Man. I can’t wait to find out who’s listening.