What I Learned Going Back to Burning Man
This is an excerpt. The full essay first appeared on my blog, nataliabielczyk.com.
This summer I started getting recurring intrusive thoughts telling me to break my own resolution and go back to the desert of Nevada. I’d sworn off Burning Man after my first trip in 2022 — too much time investment, not enough payoff for someone whose whole life is already one long honest conversation. But you don’t really argue with your intuition. Three weeks before the festival, I surrendered, booked the ticket, and went. This is what happened the second time around.
I didn’t go this time as a tourist. I went with a plan. No camp, no friends — I deliberately told none of my Bay Area people where I was staying, because joining a camp ties your hands with obligations, and because “in Poland we say: don’t bring wood to the forest.” I was there to make brand-new connections, not recycle old ones. I skipped the bike (bikes break, and when you bike, you don’t talk) and walked instead, roughly 25 kilometers a day across eight “hours” of avenues, treating every bar and every stranger as an opportunity for what I’ve started calling the reputation game: in an age of agentic AI, the people who actually pick up the phone when you need them are the whole game, and Burning Man is one of the last places that reliably filters for exactly those people.
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Packing Dutch stroopwafels turned out to be the best decision of the whole trip — they made friends in five minutes flat, every single time. I also gave myself a few smaller, sillier experiments along the way: seeing whether “the Playa provides” really stretches as far as people claim (I went looking for an owner of a 1986 DeLorean, since both the car and the festival were born that year), and making a point of doing more one-on-ones than I’d ever managed before, treating each new stranger as worth a few minutes of undivided attention.
The festival itself gave me less than I expected, and that turned out to be the point. Watching the Man collapse in flames this year, I felt nothing profound — no revelations, no inner struggle, just a strange, total presence. And it struck me afterward: happy people rarely have much to say about happiness. They don’t analyze it or write treatises on it, because they’re not struggling for it — they just are. Watching the burn, empty-headed in the best possible way, I told myself: you’ve already won this game. There’s nothing left to wait for.
I also came home rearranging my whole year around what I learned there — a homebase, a rhythm of seasonal breaks, a theory about Burning Man as an accidental simulation of a post-labor economy, and a costume decision (rabbit ears, Victoria’s Secret underwear, and a group of people whose actual job is hunting down rabbits) that I still can’t fully explain.
→ Read the full essay on my blog
In the full essay, I walk through what I’m calling functional programming applied to real life — why Burning Man’s ten principles beat goal-setting, why my personal boundaries have shifted since 2022, the lucky string of events that got me from Schiphol to Black Rock City on a plane with no assigned seat, and the whole seasonal life plan I built for myself on the way home.
Natalia Bielczyk, PhD — founder of Ontology of Value®. Originally published at nataliabielczyk.com.
