An Anthropologist Goes to Boomtown
I attended a four day rave-style music festival featuring drum and bass, psychedelic llamas, and lots of drugs. It offered key lessons on modern life from a sub-genre of our species: Homo ecstasticus.
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It was Saturday night and I was dancing in a sea of thousands of scantily clad ravers. The crowd was jubilantly writhing together—fueled, them not me, by a healthy dose of ketamine and cocaine. Euphorically, carefree, we watched a scruffy man in his underwear gyrate around stage, mixing sick beats while crooning about a flamingo pecking out a child’s eyeball.1 Behind me, a man was triumphantly waving a handcrafted black flag depicting the cartoon chef rat, Ratatouille, with a caption that read: “I don’t want to cook anymore. I want to die.”
Here I was, anthropologist on duty, at one the largest and most notorious music festivals in the world—Boomtown—to try to learn about an oft-overlooked subset of our species, Homo ecstasticus, and what they can teach us not just about why modern society is broken, but how to fix it.
I: Boomtowns
Etymologically, a boomtown refers to a place that springs up almost overnight, often due to a scarce resource. For example, in 1847, San Francisco was a placid port, home to around 1,000 people. Then, in early 1848, a Mormon entrepreneur and newspaperman named Samuel Brannan got wind of gold discoveries in the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills.
Recognizing that he owned the only store between San Francisco and the gold, Brannan bought up all shovels, pickaxes, and gold pans he could find before roving the San Francisco streets shouting “Gold! Gold on the American River!” Brannan bought many of the items for pennies, sold them at an extortionate profit, and made $36,000 in two months—roughly $1.5 million in today’s value. In the process, San Francisco became a boomtown, its population growing from a thousand to 25,000 in a matter of months. A new saying was born: “In a gold rush, sell shovels.”
Well, the organizers of Boomtown festival—held annually in a series of lush, green valleys near Winchester, England—learned that same lesson, but with a twist. Every August, they build a town from scratch—complete with ornate buildings, elaborate stages, and hundreds of paid eccentrics to serve as actors to interact with the new “citizens” of the festival. The population shoots up, overnight, from zero to 66,000, hordes bunched across the hillsides, their tents almost touching.2
And the Boomtown organizers, like Brannan before them, understand the laws of supply and demand: In a dystopian period of late capitalist drudgery, sell euphoric escapism.
In Britain, the festival-goer comes in many guises. We are a playful species and I, like many others in the diverse array of attendees, was drawn to the music, the spectacle, the camaraderie, above all, the fun.
Some at Boomtown, however, could more easily be typecast. There are the truly devoted ravers, tossing their dreadlocks over their shoulders as they climb, exhausted from yet another day of nonstop dancing, into their ramshackle, refurbished van-to-home conversions. There are the young, private school hedonists, smirking as they buy their extortionate tickets, knowing that the Bank of Mum and Dad will cover the cost, leaving them enough spending money for their weekend supply of MDMA—which they will then endlessly discuss, as though drugs are a suitable personality.3
There are the nine-to-five escapists, moneyed professionals who work in an office. They lament being a cog in the machine that the festival purports to rage against, as they spend four liberated days bouncing to music while imagining a utopian future, freed from the shackles of fake smiles and half-hearted goodbye waves on Microsoft Teams. And there are the meaning-seekers, a cornucopia of humanity, from all walks of society, who feel a little something is missing from their life. They hope that pressing a four-day drum and bass reset button might just help identify what that something might be.
To accurately identify and classify these wondrous offshoots of Earth’s megafauna, however, I needed to not only wear my anthropologist hat and don the proverbial elbow patches, but also to channel my inner David Attenborough, ever-observing, often in awe, bewilderment, and wonder at the bizarre panoply of rituals, displays, and social behaviors to witness.
On the first day, it rained, leaving the valleys a gooey mess, as bright-eyed, fresh-faced enthusiasts tried to avoid slipping while pulling trolleys laden with sleeping bags and cheap tents, the wheels churning through deep trenches of muck.
Some had adorned themselves with the inexplicable outfits unique to this festival-going subspecies of Homo ecstasticus: the vibrant head to toe yellow flash of a cheap felt costume, conspicuously camouflaging oneself as a human-faced banana; the skimpy mating displays of short skirts, tank tops, and a large acreage of bare skin decorated with a diverse agglomeration of fading ink; or my personal favorite, a jovial blue-haired specimen, her face partially obscured by a rococo-worthy headdress featuring a can of Heinz baked beans, its contents spilling out theatrically across her shoulders.4
Regardless of each individual’s chosen fabric exoskeleton, the explosion of colorful displays converged toward relative behavioral similarity, as girls with fishnet tights and fairy wings bobbed in sync with men wearing rainbow-colored bucket hats or those cosplaying as though they were one of Crayola’s 64 finest. The rhythmically-blessed would coordinate their movements with the beat, while everyone else would jerk and twitch in a more haphazard manner, though Boomtown’s sea of happy-go-lucky humanity was just pleased to have everyone adrift together.
On the second day, the blazing sun came out, for many young men the sunscreen quite clearly didn’t, and a new morphology was born: Homo decapoda, the human lobster. This creature has pale legs but is red from the waist up, its torso/carapace bisected by a diagonal bleach-colored stripe where their cross-body sling bags had shielded their skin.
Then, there were the modern incarnations of ancient traditions. Premodern armies, from ancient Egypt and the Persians to the Romans, used vexilloids—long wooden staffs with prominent decorations on the top—to express group identity and allow armies to rally to a clearly visible point, even from far away. Modern festival goers do the same with decorated heraldry known, variously, as totems, rage sticks, or doof sticks, allowing members of a splintered Boomtown clan to easily rejoin their companions, even if they have, once again, wandered off across the valley in a haze of cannabis.
Several homemade festival totems affixed animals to the top, a living legacy of the eagles and elephants of bygone militaries, replaced now by iridescent jellyfish and electric octopuses. (With my Attenborough mindset operating at peak levels, I wondered how strange it would be to see the inverse; an octopus drifting within a towering coral reef, one of its tentacles carrying a homemade kelp doof stick decorated with a kaleidoscopic depiction of a human, as nearby octopuses romp and twirl in unison across the seabed).
I, for one, had the pleasure of encountering a stuffed psychedelic llama, perched above a gnarled wooden staff, while a techno brass band belted out melodic beats.
I admired the llama.
“His name is Dave,” the man explained.
To my left, a young woman opened up her satchel, took out her house keys, and a little plastic baggie. She delicately opened the bag—careful not to spill its contents—and placed a tidy white heap on the silver groove of her house key, until, like in a magic trick, it had disappeared up her nose.
We, humans, are a mimicking sort of species, imitating each other from a young age, so I too slipped a little plastic baggie from out of my bag, delicately opened it—careful not to spill its contents—and withdrew my protective ear plugs.5
II: The Philosophy of Ecstatic Experience
highlights how post-Enlightenment Western culture largely severed the nearly universal impulse for engaging in rituals of ecstasy, stuffing that part of ourselves into the far more orderly box of rationality and reason. Evans quotes the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich, who described this historic shift, previewing modern disdain for a drum and bass music festival:“The essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythms of the drums, to wall itself up in a fortress of ego and rationality in the seductive wildness of the world.”
Much of human history—and much of humanity alive today—maintains an enchanted worldview, of spirits and symbols. Formidable scientific progress was made when significant swaths of Western modernity jettisoned those belief systems during the Scientific Revolution, but it came with a cost. Freed from the intellectual shackles of irrationality, we have embraced new shackles of behavior.
Evans offers a lament for this shift, channeling a healthy dose of Foucault;
“We must learn to govern ourselves and control our impulses, not to placate any supernatural beings, but rather to win the approval of the Public, the new god of the humanist universe. The Public is always observing us, and we must remain polite and self-controlled at all times, lest people think we’re unreliable or crazy, and we get ridiculed or ostracised or locked up…Rational control is the basis of morality, and losing control is shameful…
“We must play our role in the great complex web of globalised capitalism…But the self we construct is an exhausting place to be stuck all the time. It’s isolated, cut off by walls of fear and shame, besieged by worries and ambitions, and conscious of its own smallness and impending mortality. That’s why we need to let go, every now and then, or we get bored, exhausted, and depressed.”
We are goal-oriented beings, yes, but some of the most joyful aspects of being human are characterized by the pursuit of feelings of awe and directionless euphoria. Today, however, we are bombarded by messages to squash that impulse like a bug. Our time is supposed to be endlessly productive.
This self-imposed cage has become even more all-encompassing in the internet and social media age, in which someone could always be snapping photos or filming. Anonymity has disappeared, an ever-present risk of reputational damage inflicted by mere silliness, our playful selves buried even further within us.
And yet, as the Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch reminded us, we have an innate need, from time-to-time, for unselfing, a sort of transcendent joy of life that’s unleashed when we feel one with others, with nature, or simply are awash with a sensation of being completely, utterly free. “In profound moments of ego-loss,” Evans writes, “people feel deeply connected to something greater than them – nature, the cosmos, humanity, God…In mystical literature, these deeper moments of ego-loss are known as ‘ecstasy,’ from the ancient Greek ekstasis, which literally means ‘standing outside’ the self.”
In the hippie culture of the 1960s, or the New Age movements of the 1970s and 1980s, people began to rebel against systems that stamped the ecstatic experience from life. In the late 60s, “free festivals” exploded in Britain, the countercultural early precursors to events like Boomtown. As one academic study notes, “Such events were ‘free’ in several senses: the bands played for free, there was no entrance fee, no camping charge (indeed, seldom any tents), and minimal bureaucratic organisation.”
However, as society has shifted, the festivals have changed, too.
On the one hand, we have succumbed to what I call The Red Queen Fallacy, as people’s lives have been swallowed up by managing inboxes. Many of us have lost our connection with nature, consumed instead by “hustle culture” and “life hacks.” That has made the need for euphoric unselfing increasingly urgent and widespread; more and more people want to take a break from the rigid, exhausting script that dictates 21st century life.
On the other hand, festivals are not immune to these cultural and economic shifts, meaning that most major festivals—including Boomtown—are part of the corporatized world we often yearn to escape. LiveNation, which as of 2022 owns a minority stake in Boomtown, has an annual revenue of $22 billion, moving the festival from an underground countercultural event to a more regulated space for what some scholars call “licensed transgression,” in which you pay to break the rules and cultural norms that govern society beyond the festival fence.
In other words, a greater share of people feel a pulsing urge to escape from modern, corporatized life, but ironically, the events on offer are often bankrolled by titans of modern, corporatized life. This commodification of unselfing should be a wake-up call: Something is amiss in the world’s Boomtowns.
III: Late to Work, Bullshit Jobs, and Beans on Toast
On the Saturday night of the festival, shortly after I watched a rather intoxicated young woman try to smash up some pills using her iPhone—the pills were stubbornly firm, the screen was not—I observed a far finer specimen of Homo ectasticus, a man diligently unselfing in his own little world.
Perched halfway up a hill, isolated from the crowds, he wore a bowler hat, a single gold hoop earring, three-quarter length yoga trousers, and a coiffed moustache that would be the envy of Hercule Poirot. As the subwoofer belched out powerful vibrations—the kind felt throughout your body such that you become aware of your pancreas for the first time in your life—this man twirled two whips around, cracking them in time with the beat.
But as the evening’s main act—Marc Rebillet—took the stage, the entire spectacle took on an even more poetic absurdism, an entire performance aimed at critiquing the highly regulated straitjacket of modern life. Rebillet, an explosively eccentric performer known for his outlandish high-energy improvisation, stood on stage in only his underwear, cracked open four beers, chugged one, lunged forward and grabbed a life-sized cardboard cutout of the late Queen Elizabeth II from a person in the front row of the pulsating crowd, and brought it onstage.
“She’s watching the show,” he explained, as the beat dropped.
Later, after bringing a flamethrower on stage and demonstrating its impressive firepower—waves of heat washing across those of us in the front row—Rebillet played a fan favorite: “Late to Work.”
The lyrics may not challenge Dickinson, Hughes, or Whitman for their literary flourishes, but they do tap into the deeper social malaise that drives people to festivals. [Note: these lyrics have been lightly edited with asterisks for the more sophisticated reader, though it is likely that you will—with a bit of clever deductive reasoning—be able to surmise the meaning of the obscured text].
“You're late to work who gives a f**k / It's your life b**ch!
F**k you boss, I'm late / I'm late / I'm late / I'm late / I'm late
What you gonna be doing about it?
I said I'm late / I'm late / I'm late / I'm late / I'm late
You gonna fire me?
There's no one else here, b**ch!
As I looked around at the roaring crowd, Dave the Llama was being thrust up and down ever more enthusiastically as the song reached its crescendo. Rebillet had captured the ethos of the modern festival: a bit less flower power, and a bit more rage against the often preposterous nature of our modern world.
We are the richest, most prosperous people to ever live and yet we capitalize on that astounding good fortune by spending much of our lives trapped in chairs looking at screens, sitting alone scrolling through stupid videos, endlessly typing “I hope this message finds you well” and “as per my recent e-mail” and “best wishes,” when we’d rather be spending time with loved ones, engaged in playfulness or adventure, or, as with Rebillet, dancing away a carefree night with strangers in a field.
Another Boomtown act, Beans on Toast, dialed down the absurdism while amping up his acoustic guitar, but provided a similar message.
We’ve got our silly clothes on / we’ve got our funny hats / it’s better than the real world / and that’s a f**king fact / and when I wake in the morning to the sea of tents / I’m glad I’m this side of the fence
These are songs written by people and for people who gaze out at the landscape of modern economics and see a wasteland of meaning. If we are lucky, we will each live around 30,000 days. Exactly how many of those precious rotations of the Earth do we want to devote to the soul-sucking task of clearing the inbox?
It’s worth maintaining some perspective; we, those lucky few in rich democracies, have it far better than countless billions past or present. Clicking a mouse isn’t exactly like being a child toiling in a coal mine. Inbox zero is a better goal than coal dust zero.
But there is something pernicious about many modern jobs that require more escapism than in the past. In his brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, Douglas Adams imagines that the residents of the planet Golgafrincham fear impending doom, so they build three spaceship arks to save their skins.
Into the “A” Ark, the plan suggested, they would put the leaders, the scientists, the high achievers and innovators. Into the “C” Ark, they would put the people who made things and did things, the construction and factory workers, the nurses and teachers, the engineers. But into the “B” Ark went the middlemen, including management consultants, marketing executives, and telephone sanitizers.6
In the end, only the B Ark left, programmed to crash land into another planet, and the remaining residents of the planet Golgafrincham lived a happier, more pleasant life without them. (They were later wiped out by a virulent disease, spread from a dirty telephone).
The point is that if Adams had been writing in 2024, I have no doubt which ark would have welcomed—with open arms—not only the “influencers,” but the vast army of quietly enraged people who have jobs that feel utterly pointless. It’s not that those people are useless—they’re absolutely not—but that they have been shoehorned into what the late anthropologist David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. These are jobs where you wouldn’t really notice if they disappeared, and the employees themselves find their work tedious, dreary, meaningless.
Why don’t you ever hear about strikes among middle managers or paper pushers or private equity sharks or McKinsey spreadsheet gurus? Part of the reason is that, as Graeber points out, strikes tend to only happen where the absence would be noticed, disruptive to the rest of society. These days, many people don’t have jobs like that. And in the immortal lyrics of festival legend Beans on Toast, that’s a problem, because “Life without purpose / is a quick road to crazy.”
There has been an explosion of bullshit jobs in modern life, and raving at a festival is one form of self-medication that disillusioned people use to cope—by escaping their own personal B Ark, for a long weekend of unselfing.7
Thankfully, though, there is a better way—and it involves a slow-release dose of enduring ecstasy, a kind that doesn’t come in pill form.
IV: Reclaiming Ecstasy for Daily Life
As I wrote in Fluke, humans need a balance between the order of the Apollonian—a god of order, logic, reason—and the Dionysian—an irrational agent of chaos who loves to party and dance.
To do so, we must make sure that each of our daily lives is full of exploration, simple pleasures, and pleasant surprises—flukes—and moments where the anxious futures embedded in to-do lists are obliterated in our minds, at least for a time, by a feeling of overwhelming joy in the present moment.
Aristotle wrote not of fleeting happiness, but of lasting eudaemonia, or flourishing. Such flourishing certainly doesn’t come from the tedious monotony of being stuck in a bullshit job, but it probably doesn’t come from writhing around once a year in a muddy field, either.
Instead, the essential lesson for me—a self-appointed anthropologist of Boomtown—was this: every human, no matter their station in life, their culture, or their personality, everyone needs a regular outlet that brings them an overwhelming sense of soul nourishing euphoria. Go a little crazy. Indulge the passion lurking within. Unselfing is good for us.
That sensation can be produced by awe, a transcendent experience inspired by the momentous—the Grand Canyon—or the minuscule, the intricate beauty of evolution’s wisdom embedded in the patterning of a flower. It can come from a potent sense of togetherness and teamwork, an empowering feeling of being part of something larger than oneself. It can come from religion, from spirituality, or engaging with a fresh philosophical idea. It can come from love. But it has to come from somewhere, and it is best when it’s a ritualized part of our lives, not a blip in the calendar that we engineer to—for a few carefree days—escape from our lives.
Homo ecstasticus is a misunderstood subspecies. Humanity is, by nature, playful and adventurous. We are ever-striving beings. But when we are trapped in cycles of dystopian meaninglessness, the isolating bleak individualism of modern digitized society can stamp out our true nature. And when faced with the tragicomic absurdity of being a living, breathing inbox drone, I certainly can’t blame those who, like me, spent our hard-earned cash to enjoy some serious tunes alongside our newfound friend and psychedelic life coach: Dave.
Thanks for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. If you enjoy my writing, or if this article made you think, or feel feelings, or contemplate the meaning of life, or inspired you to befriend a psychedelic llama—then perhaps you might get a tiny dose of eudaemonia by supporting my work with a paid subscription for the low, low price of just $4/month. Or, alternatively, check out my new book, FLUKE. I have a suspicion you might like it.
I was—believe it or not—sober the entire festival, save for one overpriced, mediocre Negroni from a dubious cocktail van, to which I vowed: never again.
There are distinct neighborhoods throughout the festival—and even a mayoral race.
If you want to know what I’m talking about here, and you don’t mind extremely weird, extremely rude lyrics, this is the link to “Flamingo” by Marc Rebillet.
Her mate was clearly a good-natured match, dressed in a Heinz t-shirt showcasing the glory of baked beans.
Dear reader, let me explain: I was an eight year-old aficionado of the American Civil War. One does not have childhood subscriptions to two erudite magazines such as America’s Civil War and The Civil War Times, and later somehow end up being the coolest dude at a rave. Long ago, I made peace with that.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which ark would be the appropriate place for a professorial Substacker.
Of course, I shouldn’t paint with too broad a brush. Many people attend festivals for a simpler reason: they like the music and the atmosphere.
As the late, great, Humphrey Lyttelton put it: "As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation."
You're like the Joan Didion of our times...keen sense of observation...willing to go the distance...crucially skilled at parsimony and discernment...sober person among the stoned.