When I contemplate events like Burning Man it honestly just looks like a strange form of poverty tourism.

It's a really strange thing to watch events like Burning Man unfold in the public eye. This year, I guess, there was a climate catastrophe, and torrential rains turned the ancient lakebed in Nevada on which it is held into a bog of mud. But even when it isn't this, it's a desert where you have to take everything you need with you and be prepared. Some years there's insects. In other years there's just that dust that the wind gets into everything. I've spoken with people around here who go to Burning Man, and they are predominantly 1) rich or at least "well-off", 2) white, and 3) liberal. And they are usually the kind of "fit" liberal that has never had to work low wage paying jobs in the heat and fight off insects (like working on a farm for example, which is something I did for years). The reason they're fit is because they have money and time to stay fit. So think light hours, work at home stuff, paid highly, and can afford nutritious food or they know someone to prepare food for them (who may be glad to do it because of easy access to sex and/or money). Many of them have never been to places like Yellowstone Park, but they've had safe liberal upbringings wherein their feelings were validated, they were taught conservation, recycling, and wokeness, and they were told, by and large, that they were special snowflakes. And I'm a person that votes democrat, so there you have it. Someone in the party looking at other people in my party and calling them "special snowflakes." Sigh.

And the reason I say that it is strange is because these people who have all of these comfortable lives desire to go out and just live in misery for a week. They practice radical inclusion and seek to bond with artists and others who are into drugs and showing off their bodies and they kind of get together in this place that really can't support life to bring art and get narcissistic supply from others regarding that art. But I can't help but feel it's just another form of poverty tourism, where people don't actually have to live in misery, but they can dip their toe in it to experience it first-hand, and when it gets to be too much, they have their luxurious unrelatable lives to go back to and chalk it up as "the experience of a lifetime." I mean...there are people who scrabble out lives everyday in the world, and who create art. It would be difficult for me to imagine a Burning Man event in some countries in the Middle East, ya know? like...would the poor of Morocco or Tunisia be compelled to go out into the desert and get caught in flash floods and live in the desert for a week? No. That's because a lot of them do actually live in the desert, and their idea of a good time is probably the opposite: someplace wet with luxuries and lots of green places and yes...art...because humans like art.

We've reached this point in our society where there are so many people who just can't relate to other people. Like, one of the things I've been kind of mesmerized by is Kevin Costner's bitter divorce. Last week, his ex was trying to justify getting $160,000 a month or something similar in child support for her two teen sons when Costner's lawyers were arguing for only $60,000 a month, saying that was sufficient. So they asked Costner's ex why she thought that wasn't enough. Her response, which was totally unrelatable at all went something like this: "My sons have always been fifty steps from dipping their toes in the ocean. They have luxury in their D.N.A. If I don't get $160,000 a month, it will bring serious harm and hardship upon them." When I read that, I was like...whaaat? And then I imagined these boys, probably being raised in a wealthy liberal household (just guessing), as future Burning Man attendees. I could see them going just to "experience" the mud and the insects. "Wow...man! You need to go to Burning Man. What an experience?!" And then there's me thinking, yeah I pulled insects out of my hair and slogged through mud moving pipe on my dad's farm and that sounds a lot like something I never want to go back to. No thanks." It's just...so weird. So weird to think that people glamorize crappy things. And the reason that they do is because they have nothing crappy or that sucks in their lives, and somehow...the lack of misery makes them yearn for it? What? That doesn't even make sense but there you go.

It makes me wonder how, exactly, our species can possibly tackle the huge issues of our time (like climate change) when none of us have lives that are relatable?