The Vibes Are Made Out of People(!)
Last year I (temporarily) found Inner Peace. After a lot of written introspection I realize this was overwhelmingly due to being around friendly people a lot. It was simultaneously mind-blowing and utterly face-palming that it could be something so simple and cliché, but there it is.
There were many amazing things about VibeCamp, the most emotionally-salient ones are covered in my previous post. But underlying all that, and making it possible, is the constant, unending presence of other people. At VibeCamp I am surrounded by other humans at every moment. Any time I walk to another location I have humans in my field of vision almost the whole time. Often I walk past a person or group, we smile and wave or nod. The sounds of humans chatting with other humans is a constant low-key hum in all the major population centers. Everyone is friendly. Frequently there is music.
I need this. It nourishes me. It is like living in the arms of a loving god, but the god is made up of all of us. I felt this at Burning Man. I felt this at Ink At The Abbey. Living in intimate proximity with double-digit numbers of people, eating communally, waking together… this is what actual heaven literally feels like. I need so many others all the time. I always did, I just didn’t know it.
No wonder life outside of these sacred grounds is so crushing. The default world is a deadlands created for machines and optimization pressures. Today we live cloistered in isolation. We evolved to live in ways that now only exist when summoned by ritual.
The rest of this post is a celebration of some of the more casual connections that happened throughout the event. People who I got to know a little bit, who were important parts of the greater tapestry of human connection. The weave of many weaker/casual connections interlaced with several intense/deeper connections is a vital part of the experience. You need both rhythm and melody in music. Both the bass backing and the guitar solo. Either is great on its own, but the combination is more than the sum of its parts. :)
Karaoke Party
This is a shout out to everyone that came to Karaoke. The event was probably the most full-throated mass-support events at VibeCamp. By which I mean, every single person was cheered like they were a goddamn rock star when they sang. We sang along. We cheered and hollered. We became involved in every song in some way. When someone was on stage, it was their birthday, and we were going to celebrate them right. It was absolutely delightful, that level of joyfully-gifted love is amazing to be a part of. Having someone running a lap around the room during a solo and dash beneath our arms-tunnel to cheers was unforgettable. For the rest of the vibe I knew several people as “the Buttercup person” or “the Cher person.” :D It made striking up conversations with them in the rest of the event afterwards extremely easy (omg I loved your rendition of X!).
Mad props to Wes for running the thing and leading/starting the birthday vibes! And to all of us for bringing the house down with “Welcome To The Black Parade.” Apparently the mass singing/shouting-along was heard for quite a distance outside the venue. :)
Never Stop Writing
Justin Kuiper set up a fiction writing panel in the barn on Friday. Quite a lot of people showed up to hear us talk about writing, how to get better at it, and how to get paid money to do it. Justin is def the lead in the latter one, he gets paid real money to write for video games full time, and I learned quite a bit too. :) I was happy to pass on some of the “I wish I had known this much sooner than I did” lessons too. A lot of people were taking notes, and I hope they find our advice useful. Being reminded just how far you’ve come over the years, and that you have something to give back to those who are trying to make the same journey, is a fulfilling emotion. Asking advice from someone is a gift to that person, never feel shy about doing so.
As a bonus, a few people came up to talk later on during the vibe based on that initial panel. In retrospect, I really wish I had stuck around longer outside the barn, just chatting with anyone who wanted to. I apologize to those who would’ve liked to talk right after, I’m new to this “people recognize me” thing. Speaking of which…
The Micro-est of Microcelebrities
I’m not very active on Twitter. My most well-known accomplishment is quite a few years in the past now. I’m just another dude in the default world, and I did not expect people to recognize me. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a microcelebrity at VibeCamp, where a lot of people with massive follower counts and leadership-ish positions in their local circles were hanging out. Yet at one point I found myself in the teahouse, ringed with people who were all interested in me specifically. Interested the things I had to say. Every one of them knew me from an audiobook or a podcast. And I was like “Oh wow… this is… kinda exactly what I had always hoped for. This is neat! wtf, am I cool? I don’t feel cool, but fuckit, I’ll take it!”
Anyway, I’m sure actual celebrity is terrible, but a tiny bit of microfame in a large teahouse… pretty darn sweet. :)
The Dark Brew Village MVP
I organized a tent village based on coffee. It was mainly for us, to have coffee together in the mornings when we woke up. A chance to chill for an hour, chat, get caffeinated, and share some coffee with anyone who wandered by. I set us up past the pond, in the most chill and lowkey area of the camp, so we’d get lots of natural shade and insane amounts of natural beauty to look out upon.
It did not go as expected. I was basing this on my Burning Man experience. At Burning Man when the sun comes up, everyone is out of their tents within a half hour to prevent being cooked. There is no such problem here, and therefore no nature-enforced Schelling Point for when to get coffee/breakfast together. The waking was far more scattered. Also, at Burning Man you have ten days to fall into a pattern, and it does take a day or two to do so. VibeCamp is far shorter, by the time the pattern establishes it’s almost time to go home! Also also, being out in the remotest part of the camp, while beautiful and peaceful, means you have to take the percolator offsite to get coffee going, and then come back with it an hour+ later. Either that’s an hour+ without coffee, or I have to get up at 7am to do coffee-chores in solitude. (Narrator: he did not get up at 7am).
Fortunately we had Hunter (aka FineAutist) to save the day. He brought hand-grinders. He brought jet-boilers. He brought gallons of water. He brought a folding table and a cooler with creamers and camp-chairs. He woke up every day at 8:00-8:30 and manned the table for HOURS, chatting with anyone that came by, and fulfilling their coffee needs until the percolator was full. He was at camp FAR more than I was, as I kept getting distracted by events and shinyes and sleeping off the previous night. I may have done the “paperwork” to get the camp going, but Dark Brew Village was absolutely his baby. His labor and his love made it what it is. He is rightly the true mayor of the village, and I am super grateful to him. <3 and thank you!!
Fun trivia - it’s cheaper to buy a percolator on Amazon and have it delivered to VibeCamp and give it away afterwards, than it is to ship it back home to save it for next year. That is the power of the distribution network of Amazon. Yes, it has many problems. But it has made us immensely more wealthy in many ways too, and this is one of them.
Embodied Personality?
It was surprising how the people you follow long enough start to form visual representations in your head, despite having never seen them. I realized BayesianAsian looks like the mental image I didn’t even know I had. Even more surprising, I saw a person in the near distance bouncing along and thought “huh… that is exactly what I expect a goblinodds would look like…” and two seconds later someone ran past me with arms flung open hollering “GOBLIIIIIIIINNNN!!!!”
This implies that personality and physical body have enough correlation that our subconscious picks up on it and creates a stereotypical rough-image even when we’ve never seen a person? wtf??
(tho I admittedly had some context clues from posts, like goblin is short and bayesianasian is asian)
Final note - I’m terrible with IRL names, and even worse at connecting them to twitter handles. If you’re the swiss guy that was with us every morning chatting over coffee, or the dude with bedroom eyes and super long hair that looks like you always have a private joke you’re tickled about and you look like your from The South, pls hit me up. I probably follow you already, but I don’t know which of my follows you are! T_T
I'm fascinated by how much your description of the vibecamp community resembles those of monastic societies like the Benedictines (though with obvious differences).