Burning Man, Floating, and Steering

Max Brody
Max Brody
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

For every year of my post-college life, I’ve had the opportunity to go to Burning Man. What began as a life-altering cultural shock has evolved into one of the most impactful rituals of my adult life. This year marked my 5th.

It’s notoriously difficult to describe the atmosphere that a gathering of its intensity and scale creates. You can look at pictures, but nothing can capture the felt experience, the qualia, of actually being present for it. The extreme physical conditions, mixed with the alternate moral and social structure creates a type of space that feels unique to human history.

At its core, Burning Man for me has always been about connecting with new people. I always go with a few friends, but end up spending most of my time getting to know people I’ve never met. I come back each year feeling externally exhausted and internally rejuvenated.

Of the many transcendental conversations I had this year, one focused on how this festival was, in many ways, the closest our post-religion culture has to a modern-day Mecca. With all of our rationality, all our smug certainty in the fact of the dead materiality of the experienceable universe, we find ourselves with a gaping hole of internal meaning. The depth of our inner experience is sacrificed on the altar of “progress”, without the questioning of whether the pursuit of material growth is actually creating a better life for any of us. Burning Man is an experiment in a post-rational society.

At one point during the week, I met a 20-year-old that eerily reminded me of an earlier version of myself. What I expected to be a few minute chat with a new friend turned into a six-hour deep dive into philosophy, art, purpose, meaning, consciousness, and being. It’s these types of extended interactions that are nearly impossible to have in places other than Burning Man. The normal constraints of the “default world” don’t apply. Usually, people have to go somewhere, or the party ends, or the bar closes, before a certain depth of conversation can be reached. But at Burning Man, people never have to leave, the party never ends, the bar never closes, and interactions can bloom into their full being.

We talked of the many awakenings occurring for young people across the globe, such as the generational realization that getting trapped by the illusion of seeking a “secure” job is a sugarcoated hike to near-certain misery. We spoke of taking risks, and of how youth is a time designed for boldness rather than caution. We discussed esoteric theories of awareness, and the root of the fear still so present in the world: The fear of not being happy, the fear of not being rich enough, the fear of life’s views not being Instagram-worthy, all encapsulated in the meta-fear of “missing out”. These fears grow from a potential mismatch of our inner construction of the way the world ought to be, with the way the world actually is. We talked of how desire, at its core, is indistinguishable from suffering.


I continue to recommend Burning Man to everyone I know. I’m not sure if everyone I know is prepared for it, but being unprepared for it is as much a part of the experience as anything else. No matter how old you are, where you live, how much money you have, and what you care about, there is something at this mysterious festival to gain. There’s a reason everyone from broke hippies to woke billionaires find it meaningful. It’s a taste of the future. It is being-expanding in a way that only an analog experience can be in this digital age.

There are always a few days at the beginning where I ask myself: “Why did you do this again? This is so uncomfortable. You’ve been here before. You could have gone to the beach and instead came to the arid desert to breathe dust and not shower. You are crazy.” But that first stage always passes, and the reason for coming seeps through.

Just like all aspects of reality, the internal and the external co-arise. The external of Burning Man is grueling and exhausting, while the internal is inspiring and energizing. People come for the internal experience that the harsh shared external experience creates. Everyone feels a certain sense of bonded-ness because they have shared a mutually difficult journey, and managed to survive. Because of that pre-bond, people are extraordinarily open to meeting each other and making new friends. Among the sea of other novelties, the dynamic between strangers always reigns as my favorite aspect of the gathering.


This year I pushed my limits, did things I’d never before done, talked in ways that were foreign to me, and tried to understand those who were incredibly different. I made new connections, from the romantic to the platonic to the professional. I gifted experiences to new friends and received experiences from others.

At one point, I took off from my camp to bike around alone. I was looking for something, but wasn’t sure what. I had been meditating on the idea of productivity and flow, and felt like there was some idea out there for me, some unknown something that I needed to find. This mindspace itself is uniquely resonant within the mesh of synchronicities emergent from the chaos.

As I biked and took in mile after mile of spectacle, searching for whatever I was seeking, one camp caught my eye. It had a large sign out front that read “FLOAT MORE, STEER LESS”. That first word — float. That’s what I was looking for. I’d been thinking a lot about the fleeting experiences of being perfectly in tune with creativity, and how it doesn’t feel difficult when you are in an optimal performance state. I’d been trying to create a thought process I could re-engage at will to snap into that optimal state whenever I wanted. For whatever reason, the verb ‘to float’ felt like an immediately-recognizable key to that process. Floating implies a current, a stream, a river of dimensionality that can be either fought or received. It implies that the bobbing undulations of time deliver an ever-better present. It felt true.

And I suppose that’s why I keep floating back. The density of memory-making and meaning-making that occurs is always worth more than the sacrifice of time and money. Countless snapshots of my early 20’s are set in the backdrop of the Black Rock Desert, weaving through art megastructures on a rusty bike and having the best interactions of my life. If the next few years look anything like the last few, I think I’ll keep floating on.

Written by

Max Brody

ceo of cent; lover of wisdom; writer of songs

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