Is Burning Man Fun or Is It Misery?

After reading stories about wind, sand, and mud, our articles editor examines the media mystery that exists with Burning Man

Share

Save

Dust, sun, and bikes. What's not to like? (Photo: Susan Becker/Burning Man Facebook)

Hey, did you hear: Burning Man is going on right this moment!

Like me, your Instagram feed is probably chock-full of videos of your coolest friends, all dressed like Rob Zombie in the Thunder Kiss ’65 music video, gyrating and boogying atop a 50-foot-tall metal thingamajig covered in neon lights. These people seem to be having a blast.

But wait—are they actually enjoying themselves? For every bonkers video of dance parties, cars that look like the Concorde, or people going ham inside of a Mad Max-inspired Thunder Dome, there’s also at least one story in a mainstream news outlet about Burning Man chaos and Burning Man misery.

And if you’ve been staring at this content all week, like me, you may be contemplating the eternal Burning Man question that all non-Burning Man attendees ask themselves.

Is Burning Man really that fun?

Over the years, news sites have published stories about epic sand storms and bottomless mud bogs, and ones about hopelessly marooned partiers being reduced to pooping into a plastic bag. Yes, you’ve probably read some of these pieces on Outside. 

And wow, an impressive tonnage of news about Burning Man misery has graced the Internet in 2025. It all kicked off this past Saturday, August 23, when a gale-force winds battered the playa. Gusts measuring 52 miles an hour shredded tents, filled eyeballs and other body parts with coarse sand, and blew glittery costumes high into the stratosphere before the festival even kicked off.

Media outlets dubbed the storm a “bad omen” for the coming burn, and at least according to the news stories, things only got worse. The festival shuttered its entrance during the wind, creating a traffic jam of epic proportions—the line of recreational vehicles, pickup trucks, and probably a war rig or two, stretched to the horizon.

Then, rain drenched the dusty landscape, turning it into peanut buttery mud. As SFGATE columnist Timothy Karoff explained “within minutes of my arrival, my sneakers were completely caked in mud. Not a thin cover, but a two-inch think clump so heavy it made my Nikes feel like moon boots.”

The moon boot-clad attendees then discovered the worst news of all. Burning Man’s famed Orgy Dome—a massive tent where attendees meetup to, well, you know what they do inside—was declared unusable after it sustained crippling damage in the wind storm. Ack, no orgies this year. Huge bummer.

After that, there’s been a steady trickle of minor calamities: a guy got electrocuted, there was more rain and mud, and then there was this report about the event feeling like a “zombie apocalypse.”

OK—back to the eternal Burning Man question. Despite these stories of horror, the Burning Man people in my Instagram feed and on my favorite YouTube channels are still so stoked. It’s as if they live in an entirely different universe from the one described to me by The New York Times. 

What’s the root of this Burning Man paradox? Why is there such a distorted view of the festival in media reports when compared to the man-on-the-ground perspective? Should we all—as the Times suggests—just stop talking about Burning Man? It’s been around for nearly 40 years, after all.

I posed the question to Outside contributor Brent Rose, who covered the 2023 edition for us. In my eyes, Rose is the perfect person to help us understand the paradox. He’s been to Burning Man six times, and in 2023 he endured one of the worst calamities in the festival’s history: the goopy quagmire that stranded thousands on the playa. Yes, Rose is the guy who had to poop into a plastic bag.

So, why do Burning Man attendees love the festival, while media outlets focus on the disasters?

“I think there’s a real appetite in the media and from people who are reading these websites for Burning Man to be a catastrophe,” he said. “People hate Burning Man, especially people who have never been to it, because there is an obnoxiousness to it.”

Outlets will forever be able to make Burning Man look like hell on earth, due to the location of the festival. Nevada’s Black Rock Desert will always be buffeted by winds and blasted by rain in late August. And millions of people will read these stories of Burning Man calamities, because we all secretly hate Burning Man.

But for attendees, the party that goes on usually overshadows the harsh conditions, Rose told me.

“You get to engage in this silliness and playfulness that is missing from adult life,” he told me. “Where else can you go order free french fries from this 30-foot ketchup bottle in the desert.”

Rose did not attend Burning Man this year due to a scheduling conflict, but he said that his friends at the festival have texted him various photos and updates about their fun experiences. And yeah, the wind and soaring temperatures have made life difficult. But he told me he can’t wait to go back.

And yeah—this coming from a guy who literally had to poop into a bag back in 2023. Call me crazy—I think I’d call it quits after that.

Whether Rose’s perspective forever solves my Burning Man paradox is, of course, not guaranteed. And I can guarantee that I personally will never attend the thing.

But from now on, when I read another headline about a destroyed orgy tent, or about sandstorms, or about a celebrity hiking for six miles to escape waist-deep mud, I’ll also assume that at least a few people had a good fun.