Everything is Logistics Until You Make Meaning

One day, on a Saturday afternoon spent on shopping, cleaning and other chores, my partner said that ultimately, “everything is logistics”. She explained that most of what we do is moving things - clothes off the drying rack, food from the fridge to the kitchen counter, our bodies to the gym and the office and the supermarket - and that, viewed through this lens, our lives seem pretty devoid of meaning.

Surprisingly, every year, thousands of people trek hundreds of miles through the desert to build a gigantic, temporary city in the Nevada desert, just to take it down and trek out again without leaving a trace. I just got back from a regional burn where my campmates and I had a similar, albeit smaller-scale, experience, which involved lots of logistics. We loaded, drove and unloaded two truckloads of stuff to a former airport in rural Brandenburg to build a tent city with a fully functional kitchen on a bare patch of grass. We built a temple to a fictional deity, including raising a one-meter wide fractal chandelier four meters up into the air on chains using a climbing harness. We lived in a context in which even the satisfaction of basic needs, like eating food, going to the bathroom, or even just brushing one’s teeth become challenging logistical feats, as the infrastructure on which we all rely at home is not available and must be brought and built on-site.

Why do we go through all of this trouble? For me, it is moments of shared meaning: Ecstatic moments on the dancefloor; deep conversations on walks in the forest at night; shared laughter, hugs, moments of deep reflection.

Right now, one week post-burn, I don’t think that that meaning emerges. Rather, it is made, by the lore we weave around the things we build, by the stories we tell about the things we do and about each other, and by the shared memetic spaces we create. In the context of these shared memetics, we interpret the fruits of our labor as communities built, growth opportunities had, and contributions made to others’ experiences.

Another camp at the burn spend the entire week of the festival building a house. When the official build phase ended and the burn began, they didn’t stop building, but kept adding to the house right up to the last day of the burn, when they tore it down in an epic house party. Did they do it purely out of the love for building? Maybe. Part of me also believes that they did it out of commitment to the bit, to tell the story of the house that was built and torn down. Maybe for Sisyphos, meaning emerges from the logistics of stone-rolling, or he is fine with it having no meaning at all. Right now, I feel that logistics become much more bearable if I can tell a good story about it.