A month and a half ago, I took a plane to Reno, a bus out into the desert, and spent a week at Burning Man. This is an attempt to order some of my thoughts about that week.

(1a)

Surviving (even in relative comfort) wasn't as hard my pre-trip reading billed it as. Of course, it helped that I was camping with engineers who could reliably make a plan, ask themselves what would cause it to go wrong, fix that, repeat -- and then problem-solve when something unanticipated broke. Basic competence, responsibility, and leadership -- together with a well-adhered-to norm of "make sure you have everything you personally need, even things the camp has plans to provide" ('radical self-reliance' is the usual term) -- left us with a lot of slack.

From there, it was mostly just a matter of drinking enough water / electrolytes, noticing when I needed to eat, remembering sunscreen and moisturizer and lip balm, wiping my hands and face and feet for dust, and using earplugs, a face mask, and melatonin to get enough sleep. Easy.

(And I hadn't even been camping since I was a kid.)

(1b)

And, together, we built some awesome things:

...which took, at one point, a lift team of ~forty volunteers to lift the top section of the sphere onto the base:

And now, for a philosophical digression. (Shocked! Shocked to find that philosophical digressions are happening here!)

(2a)

Zvi Mowshowitz argues that the modern world is out to get you and eat your entire life and that we should literally bring back the Sabbath:

We need restrictions that free us from the world. We need a new four freedoms