Did you ever want to change the world?

Yes, I actually used to believe I had some higher purpose, to help people. Then I spent five weeks backpacking through India and saw in living color how most of the rest of the planet lives in abject, unimaginable poverty. "The toil of the many go to the fortunate few." It's a mad world we live in. It devastated me.

While there are people over there living in their own urine and feces wondering where their next meal will come from, we have things like giant parties over here where a city of 65k people literally sprouts up out of the desert, and everyone gets all dressed up in costumes that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars and go run amok for a week, riding on million dollar art cars, dancing all night, fucking, eating drugs, having wild fun, "radically self-expressing themselves," burning beautiful art structures to the ground in the name of impermanence (or just because), and when you get down to it: being obnoxiously wasteful (think of all the single use items like glow sticks that wind up in dumpsters after Burning Man - hundreds of thousands, easily).

I lost my idealism somewhere in India, as well as my desire to participate in such grandiose acts of narcissism and ignorant waste that I used to call "fun and spiritual" (I used to love Burning Man, before anyone calls me a needless hater). The Burning Man compare and contrast came up for me because it was going on right after I left for India, and before I left I was sort of sad to have to miss it. When I got home from India, I started conducting mental calculations on how many lives could be saved if people decided for just ONE year to cancel Burning Man and instead spend all the money they would have spent on it, and instead put it into a fund to help end poverty. It would be an INSANE amount of money. It would probably save millions of lives. Do you think people would choose that over canceling Burning Man and missing out on all that hedonism for even one year? No. Fucking. Way.

That's the kind of world we live in.

/r/SanctionedSuicide Thread