Dancing in the Dark

EDC, escapism, and leisure

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

I recently left my full-time job at Pocket Gems where I’d worked for nearly twelve years, basically an eternity in the tech world. I was taking a sabbatical or whatever you want to call it, working part-time as a consultant, taking some time off to travel, and trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life next.

It was in the midst of this transition that I attended my first Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), a nocturnal electronic music festival, lighting up the desert darkness at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. EDC is one of the largest electronic dance music festivals in the world, with well over 100,000 attendees dancing and partying for three consecutive nights from 7pm until 5:30am. I don’t know what it is about the desert that compels people to crave vaguely post-apocalyptic raves (see also: Burning Man) — suffice it to say EDC would not be out of place next to either the heavy metal truck / flamethrower guitar dude in Mad Max: Fury Road or that weird Zion rave scene in The Matrix Reloaded. If art imitates reality, it’s hard to know which is which.

An aerial shot of the speedway during EDC. The blackness in the distance is the empty, empty desert. (source)

I attended the final night with several friends, mostly EDC veterans, and let it wash over me. 

The sound, as you might imagine (this is a music festival after all) is overpowering. The moment we began descending into the central oval of the speedway that contained all the stages, my friend and guide for the evening Daniel told me, “you can put in your earplugs now, and you basically will leave them in all night.” He was right, I didn’t take them out once until we left in the morning; it didn’t matter if we were at one of the many stages watching a set, in line for the bathrooms, getting food at one of the many vendors (I ate a nice birria quesadilla at about midnight), or winding between stages: EDC is extremely loud. It is the only time I have really felt a beat pulse through my body, which frankly seems like the point — if your goal is to get thousands of people dancing in sync, there is no better way than sending out a metronomic blast wave of bass with every kick drum. The sound was not only loud, but clear. I never once felt annoyed that I was wearing earplugs — the orange 3M ones usually worn by people using chainsaws — the music rang through with complete clarity. Impressively, there was zero sound bleed from other stages when listening to a set; transitioning between them I might hear sound from multiple stages, but never when standing at one. It is a marvel of modern event planning that the organizers are able to set up eight major stages, each with their own insane audio and visual setups, a full carnival complete with rides, wedding chapel¹, food vendors, art cars and sculptures, and bathrooms to support 100,000s of attendees a night, all on top of what is normally a bunch of concrete and asphalt in the middle of a race track.

And then there are the lights. I had never witnessed so many different ways to shoot photons into your eyes in one orchestrated event: lasers, spotlights, flashbulbs, LEDs, screens of all sizes, fireworks, actual gouts of flame — all synced to the ever-present beat.

The main stage of the eight major stages, Kinetic Field, from this year. (source) To see all the lights in action, check out one of the many recorded sets.

The visual spectacle extends beyond the stages and their accompanying displays and spills out into the sea of people in the crowd: thousands of glowsticks, blinking wristbands, and flashing backpacks adorn the audience. Flying above them are flags (often of countries, sometimes of rave-themed characters) and totems — unique homemade emblems carried on poles to make it easier to find your friends amidst the masses. At one point in the evening, I found myself holding the totem that Daniel had made, a Smash Ball from Super Smash Bros lit in neon EL wire, and swaying back and forth with it in a sort of hypnotic trance listening to Martin Garrix perform. All of this — the lights bombarding your visual cortex, the crush of sound traveling through your body, the writhing mass of people — are what transform EDC from “attending a music festival” into something more basic and primal. Humans have been dancing around campfires for millennia, EDC is simply the modern incarnation. 

My night was wholly immersive and surreal, but it wasn’t immediately transformative. I did not emerge Monday morning from the Speedway with some sudden shift in perspective; mostly my feet hurt from walking 50,000 steps overnight. Rather, it was returning to work (even only part-time) on Tuesday, and the contrast that I faced that struck me. I wondered why on earth I was sitting at my desk responding to Slack messages and emails about things that did not move me instead of feeling alive while dancing in a roaring mass of humanity. I felt like I had briefly glimpsed the world outside the matrix, and was being forcibly plugged back in against my wishes.

Escapism gets a bad rap. Video games aren’t real, movies aren’t real, books aren’t real; stop wasting so much time absorbed in the unreal. I get it. We do live in a real world with real demands which require things like money, and for most people that isn’t coming from playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But the choice of the word “escape” carries meaning: the implication is we are trying to break free from some restraint or confinement imposed by reality. If so many people are eager to escape, we might want to ask what exactly they are escaping from? The labeling of these activities as “escape” suggests that these experiences, whether all-night raves or wandering the kingdom of Hyrule, are temporary flights of fancy, that they are mere digressions.

As part of taking time away from work, I also recently read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Despite the title, there is little to no practical time management advice; rather, the book takes a philosophical look at time, how little we have it, and how we might come to terms with how we spend it. Burkeman writes about the modern concept of work and leisure, and how leisure has been co-opted into something that we do in order to recharge for more work, or for “personal development”. But this is exactly backwards from the historical definition of leisure!

The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling.

Contrary to escapism, work was originally defined in contrast to leisure, not the other way around. Somewhere along the way we’d gotten them mixed up. Burkeman continues:

It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful. The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

Raving all night at EDC certainly seemed wasteful, or at least secondary or less real than my “normal” life. But maybe I was slowly, finally, beginning to break free from the default programming I’d carried all my life. Perhaps it was just a fleeting moment of chemical-fueled joy, but looking back I can say that at least for one night, I was indeed solely focused on the pleasure of the experience, not thinking about work and the future and money and personal development and my to-do list. Just present – surrounded by sound, light, and friends, alive.

I knew I’d be back.

Thank you to Daniel Heins for bringing me to EDC, recommending the book Four Thousand Weeks, and for many of the discussions that led to this piece.

1. The chapel can perform both non-legal ceremonies, but also fully legal weddings. This is Las Vegas, after all.