nemorathwald: (Matt 4)
I've customized my instructions for ChatGPT pretty heavily, to the point where it understands my preferences. Here's a very good conversation I had with it this week:

I have a very broad question about existential therapy. Consider the following three passages. The first is a paragraph from a book with an approach I find quite frustrating, "Unlearning Shame" by Devon Price. The subjectivity of Price's existentialism seems, to me, to leave them in constant despair, because there is no way to acknowledge that there is not only subjectivity, found in one's own head, there's also a pattern to things, and it's found in the whole situation. Here is the passage:
 
“I’m a big fan of existential therapy, particularly the work of Martin Adams.[41] In existential therapy, the therapist isn’t supposed to act as an authority figure. They shouldn’t push any specific goals onto their patient. Instead, they present themselves honestly, as a person who has struggled with meaninglessness and lostness in their own lives, too. From there, they can provide exercises and tools to help their client determine what matters most in their own life. It’s meant to be a very flexible and empowering therapeutic approach, inspired by the work of philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre (who believed our lives have no innate meaning, and so we have to create meaning for ourselves), and Viktor Frankl (who wrote that meaning already exists all around us, and we simply need to find it).”
 
Next is a chapter from one of my favorite books, "The Scene That Became Cities: What Organizations Can Learn From Burning Man Philosophy" by Caveat Magister. This passage also addresses existentialism. The two books are not on the same topic, but I can't help but think that in a deeper sense, they both attempt to directly address how we have meaning in life. I uploaded the chapter as a file, "Sisyphus.txt".

[Note: Caveat also wrote this article about it and posted it online.]
 
And third is a page from another of my favorite books, "Meaningness" by David Chapman. It's the page "Sartre's Ghost And The Corpse Of God", about the problems with existentialism. According to Chapman, while meaning is not objective, neither is it subjective. I have uploaded it as a file.
 
Devon Price is tormented by constant guilt, shame, and a sense of meaninglessness without taking responsibility for the world's problems as a source of meaning. But Caveat demonstrates in his book how we find meaningfulness right in front of us in the situation, and the situation is not just a subjective thing in our own head. Those who are tormented in that way are often important to me, and it seems that the conjunction of these three passages gets at something important to that. Existential therapy can help by acknowledging that meaning is not objective-- not entirely in the situation, but also in one's own subjective relation to it-- but I'm guessing existential therapy won't help Devon Price see that meaning is also in the situation. What do I need to know about existential therapy in relation to the ideas of these other thinkers (and thinkers like them)?
 
 
ChatGPT said:
Your question cuts to the core of a decades-old philosophical conflict—and possibly a critical limitation of existential therapy as commonly practiced. Let’s sketch the map:
 
1. Devon Price and Existential Therapy
Price embraces existential therapy grounded in subjective meaning. The therapist provides no direction—only empathetic co-experiencing—and invites clients to define values for themselves. This is rooted in a Sartrean existentialism where the world lacks inherent meaning, so we must freely choose our own.
 
But as Chapman argues—and as you observed—this radical freedom tends to collapse into despair. If the world offers no "hooks" to which meaning can attach, then attempts to create meaning can feel arbitrary, performative, or hollow. You’re stuck performing for yourself. That’s a tight loop, and it often feeds guilt, shame, and depressive inertia. You can see that in Price’s own affect.
 
Existential therapy can, in practice, encourage this collapse by refusing to provide any orientation beyond “what do you want to value?” When the answer is “nothing, yet I feel I must,” the therapeutic stance offers no counterweight.
 
2. Chapman: The Failure of Existentialism
Chapman’s critique is decisive: meaning is not objective, but it is also not subjective. It emerges situationally, socially, and interactively. It is a real property of engagement—not inside the head, not in the cosmos, but in participation.
 
Existentialism’s failure, he argues, lies in its metaphysical individualism. It imagines a subject abstracted from culture, society, and history, making free choices about what to value. That is impossible—and this is why, if you pursue existentialism to its logical conclusion, you land in nihilism.
 
That’s the condition you’re detecting in Price.
 
3. Caveat Magister: Meaning Is in the Situation
This is where Caveat comes in like a wrecking ball—and a builder. The chapter from The Scene That Became Cities rejects Camus’s atomized absurdism. It doesn’t say Camus was wrong—just that his image of Sisyphus is insufficient.
 
Camus tells us to find happiness in struggle. But Caveat says: why not change the game entirely? Don’t just accept the boulder and the hill. Find collaborators. Paint the boulder. Make it into a game. Use it to build castles. Meaning comes from doing things you care about in relation to others, in a situation.
 
This is Chapman's view in action: meaning as neither subjective nor objective, but emergent from participation.
 
And unlike Price’s existential therapy, this philosophy does offer direction: engage with what’s around you. Find collaborators. Try things. Meaning will emerge from the doing.
 
What You Need to Know About Existential Therapy (in this light)
Classic existential therapy (à la Yalom, Adams, Sartre-derived) often leans heavily into individual meaning-making without acknowledging its structural limits. It assumes that self-defined meaning is viable, sustainable, and authentic, without needing societal grounding.
 
It works best when clients are already capable of engaging with the world meaningfully but feel alienated. The therapist's task is then to remind them that they can still choose.
 
It fails when clients are already disconnected from context and can't find meaning. Telling them “choose your own” is like tossing car keys to someone buried under rubble.
 
Chapman’s criticism (which tracks with Magister’s) is that existential therapy doesn't go far enough. It dismantles eternalism but fails to understand that meaning isn't created alone. Meaning lives in the world, in our doing, our caring, our interacting.
 
A richer therapeutic stance would help clients re-engage the world not just as a blank canvas for their projections, but as a dynamic field of potential meaning—not imposed, not fabricated, but co-discovered.
 
Why This Matters
You care about people like Price. You want them to feel less tormented—and you sense that existential therapy, as practiced, may keep them in a loop of despair because it won't challenge their assumption that meaning must come only from within. You're right.
 
The correction isn’t to revert to objective meaning (eternalism), but to show—like Caveat does—that we build meaning through situated, collaborative, creative action. This is more than a philosophical refinement. It’s a way out of the loop.
 
If you're building frameworks for meaning, healing, or transformation—at events, in culture, or in therapy—you’re probably already pointing in this direction: away from solipsistic freedom and toward entangled agency, co-construction, and play.
 
That’s the road out of the desert.
nemorathwald: (Default)
Last week I participated in the Midwest's local regional Burning Man, called Lakes Of Fire, for the seventh time. For those who don't know, Burning Man is a week-long annual art festival with more than eighty thousand people. Lakes Of Fire is 5 days long and gets 2,300. At both of them, near the end, a giant wooden artwork (the Effigy) is burned to the ground along with a show of fire spinners, fire breathers, and fireworks. But it's so much more than that. It's a worldwide movement with branches in 36 US States and 32 countries, as a social experiment based mostly around ten principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy.

I encourage you to read the 10 principles in full. They are not a list of rules that make you superior. Not at all. They're things that tend to happen more at burns than outside them (what Burning Man participants, or "burners", call "the default world"). The principles are practical advice for getting people to be able to build bonds, and learn to rely on each other and trust themselves more, creating a massive amount of value for themselves and each other. Sometimes quick bonding is good and sometimes it's bad. But now I've come to recognize that I've seen these ideas at work in every volunteer organization I've ever been a part of, even when they were not expressed in these ten concise ideas.



The above is the sign at the entrance to Lakes Of Fire 2024: Imaginarium Aquarium. I submitted my own concept for the entrance sign, although the one above was chosen, and rightfully so because it looks great. Here's my concept art, which you can click on to see it enlarged:



The previous five or six weeks had been very hard for me in a lot of my friendships and volunteer-organized groups, so I was counting on the trip to replenish my stress level and rejuvenate my enthusiasm. I'm happy to say it did so.



Last year, I and a team of friends at i3Detroit maker space built a giant parade puppet of a life-size brontosaurus, with materials paid for by the Lakes Of Fire art grant program.



camp sign by Dan "Pups" Welcher


We happened to camp next to a theme camp named Frequencia. They liked us so much, they asked us to officially join their camp this year! It's great to be part of a theme camp. We were able to charge our batteries from the camp generator, and use the camp kitchen. Best of all, we made new friends.



giant oyster created by Oscar Bee


I didn't create another puppet this year because I joined the Art Grant Facilitators team. As someone giving out art grants, I couldn't receive one. I was assigned several artists, but they didn't need much help from me, and I got info from them smoothly. On the one hand, I brought value in that they knew if they emailed me, I would respond promptly. There's value in that. On the other hand, I didn't have much to do, and I wanted to be put to work to support this organization that exemplifies my priorities in life.



"Seahorse Surprise" by Melissa Larson





It occurred to me it would feel more natural to move up into positions of greater responsibility within the subculture if I had a burn name. That's a nickname that burners give each other. You're supposed to be given one through circumstances that occur at a burn. This year, not having a burn name began to be bothersome. Years ago I already knew what would be the perfect burn name for me, but I was attending with people from Penguicon and i3Detroit, to whom I'll always be Matt, so my suggested name just never took. I related that to my new campmates, who didn't know me from any other social context. They enjoyed making it their mission to call me by that name in front of everyone.

My burn name is "Epcot".




I went to Walt Disney World in Florida every year of my life until I was twenty, and Epcot was my favorite place in the world. In 2008, I invited some people who made giant musical Tesla coils to Penguicon. I sat on the front lawn of the hotel in an audience of more than a thousand people, while a pair of giant singing Tesla coils made music with lightning. I thought ... "I'm creating something like Epcot. It's really possible." It was a dream come true. I try to bring some of that to my maker space as well. And what we make at our maker space, often, is art specifically to bring to Lakes Of Fire. That spirit that I felt is alive at burns. I wanted a burn name that reflects the animating spirit that drives me when I'm there.




The contrasts, and the similarities, between Lakes Of Fire and Epcot are meaningful to me personally. Here are a few of the similarities.


  • The style of parade puppets I create was inspired by the puppets in Epcot's Millenium Parade.
  • Both places are known for geodesic domes.
  • Like the pavilions of World Showcase in Epcot, the pavilions of Lakes Of Fire surround a lake. In both places, they light up beautifully around the lakeshore each night, filling the surroundings with a laser light show that reflects off the glistening water.
  • Epcot is the only other place I've seen a fireworks show accompanied by dramatic music and inspirational speeches and performances over the PA system.
  • So much walking.
  • It's not commonly known that EPCOT is an acronym that stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, which sounds like a great description of Burning Man. Lakes Of Fire is run by GLEA, which stands for Great Lakes Experimental Arts.





Now for the contrasts. The approaches to an experimental prototype community of tomorrow are very different. Before it was a theme park in Florida, Walt Disney intended Epcot to be a utopian city where residents actually lived and worked. It was an exercise in total centralized planning. The eventual theme park was conceived as a World's Fair. Black Rock City, created during Burning Man in the Nevada desert each year, takes the opposite approach. An experimental prototype community of tomorrow, as decentralized as possible. And it's working.




People at Epcot are divided into the guests, and the staff, called the "cast" (cast members have been consistently wonderful people, in my experience). Whereas at a Burn, it's co-created together by unpaid volunteers, with the "no bystanders" principle of Participation. When you attend a burn, you are creating it. There's no one who you can turn to and say "I paid for you to give me an experience, now where is it?" We're all responsible.

At burns there are people wearing khaki called Rangers who are walking around as our collective eyes and ears, for anyone to go to if they need help. They're not staff, they are from among us.

Burns are for amateurs, so even if you're a professional, you collaborate with amateurs in the principle of Communal Effort.




The staff of Epcot have prepared things for guests to do. Those are the things you are supposed to do there, and if you do something else, it's out of place. You are not supposed to:

  • read poetry at a cooking class.
  • play basketball in an art gallery.
  • sell handmade crafts at a tech conference. (Unless it's my convention Penguicon.)


Each of those things has a point. But a burn is beautifully pointless! There's nothing you are supposed to do! It gives you an intimidating level of choice which confronts you with having to ask yourself questions about what you want, that maybe you normally avoid asking. I can just watch new people as they go through disorientation, wondering what to do, slowly changing as something amazing opens up and they get more in touch with what they do and do not want.

We're getting free chocolate chip cookies hot out of the oven while standing in line for free ice cream out of an ice cream truck mounted on a bicycle. The ice cream truck is made to look like a giant shark. When suddenly a stranger standing in line dressed half in ninja-gear and half in scuba-gear asks if we want to hear him recite a poem, and we say we want him to, and he recites it, and it's perfect! How did that moment happen?




While both Disney World and Burning Man have sophisticated systems for on-site emergency medical care, Epcot is tailor-made to remove as much danger as possible. And burns are not benign. But do not misunderstand that as recklessness. We are at Lakes Of Fire to get better at danger. Not to avoid it. We are as safe as necessary. But not as safe as possible! What would be the point? There are physical risks, such as setting the art on fire. Most commonly, there are emotional risks. (Remember how I said forming quick bonds with other people can be either good or bad?)

We burn not to be as safe as possible, which would mean staying home and doing nothing, but to get better at danger.

There are real stakes at a burn! That's why every weird choice you make is so potent! You are outside your comfort zone. The stakes are usually sane ones, but they are real.




World's Fairs were a celebration of progress. Here's an article by historian and novelist Ada Palmer about how Francis Bacon invented the concept of progress, discussing in what senses progress is good, and in what senses it's bad, and how progress actually works.

(By the way, this year's theme was Imaginarium Aquarium, which put me in mind of Ada Palmer's progress metaphor of fish tanks in the above article.)

There are so many ways Burning Man's decentralized and empowered societal changes can thrive where the centralized societal changes of World Fairs and Walt Disney can't keep up. But both of them want a future that's different and better. In the late 20th Century, and in this century, many people have given up on the idea that the future can be different and better. At Burning Man events, there is no requirement that participants want progress. It's not one of the ten principles. But when you're participating in the principles, you're burning, and you're doing what progress is.

And you're doing it whether or not you care about it. What you believe is not my foremost concern, and what I believe about progress need not be my fellow burner's foremost concern. "Action, not language, is the fundamental unit of meaning at Burning Man." That's from "The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better Communities", by Caveat Magister, from whom I have cribbed several points here. If people can be in love with a book like they can be in love with a person, I'm in love with that book.

The Burning Man movement shows how the future can be different and better, through a method that I've devoted the past 20 years of my life to, in every organization I've been a part of. Instead of forcing people to contribute out of fear, get out of their way, and encourage them to make the contributions they want to make, that they see right in front of them, because they are the eyes and ears on the ground who know what needs doing. We get satisfaction from contributing to things we're intrinsically motivated to do, when it directly provides meaningfulness to us and those who are doing it with us. This is the realization of the dream of an experimental prototype community of tomorrow.
nemorathwald: (Default)
Lakes Of Fire people: Help me out. I was planning to get a ticket, but I'm really struggling with a feeling of dread about attending a camping event. Whenever I hear about Burning Man and its regional satellite events ("Burns"), the complaints are specific (and devastatingly severe), but the praise is vague. Can you tell a story about something that happened to you at a Burn that was good, that would not happen just by staying home?

For a person who dislikes the outdoors, camping, bodies of water, rave music, dancing, and getting intoxicated, what is good about a Burning Man regional event? How much art is there which I can't see at my local hacker space (where much LOF art is built)? Is there food in a campsite, that I can't get a hundred times better at a restaurant?

Is a Burn just a spiritual training exercise in the "10 principles", or is it a form of enjoyment, or both? Do you enjoy it for some reason other than the outdoors and intoxicants? Do people just sit around talking? Or worse, getting obnoxiously drunk? Do I have to be radically inclusive toward intrusive behavior from drunks?

I enjoy creating experiences that other people enjoy! So, I've been trying to think of some experience I could provide to LOF attendees in the harsh and deprived environment of camping, while I'm all sticky, gross, smelly, camping, miserable, sleep-deprived, camping, begging others to gift me with the necessities to avoid becoming a filthy, starving, shivering, diseased animal, because of camping.

Is it acceptable to sleep in a local hotel? Exactly how frowned-upon is that practice?

Will I leave with both middle fingers raised in a "NOPE NOPE NOPE" the way I did at Pennsic?

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