Party to Escape or Celebrate to Connect?

Life is a Festival #49: Live at Spotify Stockholm with Gustaf Tadaa

CONTRIBUTE

A special thank you to Adam St. Simons, my Medici supporter on Patreon. If you have the means and the vibe, consider visiting Life is a Festival on Patreon and dropping a coin in the fountain.

Do you party to escape or celebrate to connect? I think we all do a bit of both, and while it’s not a bad thing to be checked out sometimes, fostering deep connections is one of the core tenets of the festive life.

Today’s podcast is in two parts. The first section is live at Spotify’s end of year party in Stockholm (please forgive the distortion on the track). The second half is our review of that experience at the Castle co-working space in downtown Stockholm two days later.

My guest on the show is Gustaf Tadaa, co-organizer of the Borderland, a Nordic regional Burning Man event and Europe’s largest self-organized festival. If you’d like to learn more about him and that event, check out Episode 2 where I interview him about leaderless leadership.

On the show we explore ways to cultivate an environment for connection both as an organizer and as an attendee. During the live taping we locate the audience with Burning Man culture and the Borderland. We talk about participation, the joy of crappy art, and the futility of understanding an event like Burning Man through photographs. In the follow up conversation we review our experience at the talk as well as the party afterwards. We answer some questions from Spotifiers including whether costumes help or impede connection and whether the transformational quality of Burning Man is simply the result of a big acid trip.

Did Gustaf and I achieve connection at the Spotify party? Tune in and find out!