Sometimes it’s even worse than you think

Rachel Haywire

May 15, 2023

Burning Man is a great event, a great experience, and a great American artifact. Having become the mainstream culture in San Francisco, it’s hard to walk down the street here without being reminded of it. At this point, it’s almost cliche to discuss it here, yet it’s incredible that something of this magnitude started out as a tiny festival on the beach and quickly became a manual for pretty much everything around us.

Yet as Burning Man has evolved, so has the culture surrounding it. It has given birth to countless spin-off parties that seek to capture the essence of the playa, some that are clearly better than others. I recently found myself at one of these parties, and while I’m not going to mention the name of it or any of the theme camps involved, I do want to discuss the experience because I need to get this out of my system. It was really, really, bad.