Reasons not to go to Burningman

I'm a Burningman evangelist. I don't just think the event is a lot of fun: I think it's an expression of much of what's good and beautiful in the human spirit. However, I try to avoid recommending the event to individuals unless I'm absolutely sure they'd enjoy it. This has as much to do with my neuroses as my beliefs--I'd feel personally responsible for the experience of anyone who went on my recommendation, and I'd worry constantly about whether they were having fun.

So when friends ask me whether they ought to go, rather than giving a simple answer, I talk about what I think the risks and rewards would be for them. Since I've already ranted at length on this site about reasons one should go, here are some reasons you might not want to:

• You find the sight of average or below-average looking people with their clothes off intensely unpleasant.

• You loathe camping (Spike: "Burningman? Are you kidding? My idea of roughing it is a B&B that only serves a continental breakfast.")

• You have a very low tolerance for heat. Note that I know several avid Burners who generally handle heat badly. They take extra precautions at Burningman. It can be dealt with.

• Avoiding annoying people is more important to you than seeking out fascinating people. Burningman has enormously high concentrations of both (with plenty of overlap, of course).

• You're extremely shy, and you're not a young woman. Making personal connections there is easy, but it's not nothing at all, and it's possible to feel very lonely there if your mood isn't in sync with the crowd's.

  There's another aspect to the shy thing. At least once or twice during your week, someone will probably shout something blood-curdlingly obscene and abusive at you. He probably doesn't mean anything by it--he's just drunk on the atmosphere of liberty...and probably a great deal of ethanol as well. If that kind of thing can ruin your day, that's a factor to consider.

Here are some bad reasons to not go:

• You're not into drugs. Are there a lot of folks there to get high? You bet. Let's be real generous and say it's three quarters of the population. That leaves only about seven thousand, five hundred people for you to associate with for a week.

• You're not comfortable getting naked in public. At most of Burningman, a very low proportion of the population actually has their naughty bits waving in the breeze--less than 10%, I'd say. For some reason, that group seems to be photographed a lot more than the rest of us.

• You hear it's not as cool as it used to be. This one I have to struggle not to be sarcastic about. Suffice it to say that if you are anxious to please the arbiters of cool, then for you they may well be correct.

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