On Vibing and Camping
How Having Quite A Good Time Can Alter Your Life
I had quite a good time at Vibecamp this year.
Vibecamp is for the uninitiated, a yearly gathering in the forest of Northern Maryland with an atmosphere somewhere between “Burning Man” and “Summer Camp for Adults.” Participants lean Rationalist or woo/post-rationalist, many either participate or lurk around certain clusters in twitter, but no single trait unifies everyone there. The organisers like to say “Vibecamp is a container,” and basically this means that attendees create most of the “programming” and a lot of the value proposition lies in the opportunity to spend time around the kind of people who go to Vibecamp.
I, somewhat oddly, came to VC2 but had not been back until this year. I chose not to go in 2024, and in the summer of 2025 I was in the faraway Kingdom of Siam studying the Mysteries of the Orient. I returned to VC5 with renewed enthusiasm however, driving a carload of attendees out into the wilderness and throwing a couple of workshops of my own on the schedule. While there got one-shotted by the aerial silks, played croquet, successfully ran both my events—one a Yoga Moon Salutation class and the other an Intro To Shibari Workshop—danced a lot, had quite a few very good conversations in the tree net and the teahouse, and melted into some very pleasant cuddle puddles in the same. I had quite a good time.
I use the slightly underwhelming adverb advisedly—Vibecamp has something of a reputation for high highs and (more rarely) low lows. Many attendees talk about life-changing realisations and major shifts in outlook, particularly in terms of breaking through established patterns that hold them back from embodied connection and joy. I was open to something like that happening; since going through Yoga Teacher Training I’ve felt like I’ve been “halfway to somewhere” spiritually speaking, and like there’s some kind of roadblock in front of me that will either require more concerted effort or some clever trick that I haven’t found yet to bypass. I did go to some meditation workshops while there and talk to some other spiritually-inclined people, but nothing really life-changing happened on that front—the closest I came to it was being reminded how much I like dancing and that I should probably organise my life so that I can do so every week. Providing a bit of the programming was also more rewarding than I expected—I got great feedback on both my events, and the Shibari workshop had a full 40 attendees—it felt nice to start contributing, even in a small way, to the reasons that people come to Vibecamp. Mostly though, I just hung out and had rewarding and stimulating conversations.
So I definitely got some useful takeaways from Vibecamp, and I had quite a good time—even when I was being meta-dissatisfied with how I engage with people, there was a lot of very pleasant physical intimacy going on that I value really highly. It wasn’t until Sunday that I realised that “quite a good time” might be the life-overturning lesson for me.
But Could I be Having Quite a Good Time… All The Time?
Since starting to get established as a yoga teacher I mostly don’t hate my life. A lot of times I actually like it. I have a good routine that gets me out of the house, I see friends and friendly acquaintances, I go to church on Sundays and the gym on most days. I am, I think, happier and less stressed than most Americans. So, it’s easy for me to forget that I am, in a couple of critical ways, still *extremely* unsatisfied with my day-to-day existence.
See, there are people who are, meaningfully, my people. This categorisation cuts across many political and social boundaries, and while fully elaborating it would be the subject of its own blog post, it is sufficient here to say that “my people” are roughly contiguous with “Vibecamp people.” One thing I kept being struck by was the reminder that there are so many people in this extended circle with whom I have very little in common in disembodied internet space but possess excellent chemistry with in face-to-face social interaction. “Very little in common online” ranges from a person whose primary intellectual interests lie in arcane technical matters well outside of my understanding to some who, I suspect, I would wind up “mutually blocked” with had we first interacted on twitter rather than in person, and yet in both cases we had very nice times together—and actively sought out each others’ company—at Vibecamp. A month after an event like this I *miss* these people intensely, but what’s worse is after that I *forget that I miss them.* We don’t interact much and I only think of them when I hang out with a mutual friend and we catch each other up on how our people are doing—or, worse, I only see their tweets and the primary emotion I feel towards them is annoyance. Even beyond those there are people I do have chemistry with both online and off, but for whom I only get that smaller online shard of friendship with most of the year. Is friendship even real when not grounded in consistent IRL social interaction? I think yes, but it’s a truncated form of friendship, and over time it will wash away and fade unless constructed on the most solid of foundations.
These people—my people—are not, on the whole, concentrated in Washington, DC. There are more of them here than there probably are in, say, Raleigh, NC, but ultimately DC comes in a very distant third (perhaps tied with Seattle) after New York and San Francisco for concentrations of people I feel a strong connection to. There are many people in this city who I care for and even love who fall somewhere on the ragged edge of this grouping or else just outside it, but I find that spending time at their parties and events puts me in headspaces I don’t want to live in. I was once a politics nerd; I do not want to be a politics nerd—this is not a city for people who do not want to be politics nerds. Socially, this is bad enough, but I’m beginning to understand too the ways that this separation is probably hurting my career. I am increasingly specialising into a kind of “rigorously applied health woo” space in which, for me, yoga is just the first of several modalities that I hope to acquire and combine. There are other people in this space, and there is a high intersection between them and the people that I am most drawn to socially. At Vibecamp making useful connections in or related to this broad field happened almost without effort—in DC it feels like pulling teeth.
There are of course those who long for a perpetual Vibecamp, and it might come across as though that is what I hope for. I do not. Vibecamp itself will always be a particular high point—beyond and outside of everyday life—but I’ve spent enough time in places with higher agglomerations of my people to know that living there can, in aggregate, recreate many of things I like about Vibecamp that can realistically be ported into everyday life. Meeting others of my tribe can happen serendipitously, or at least with minimal effort, and that in itself is enough.
Over the course of Vibecamp I met more than a few people for whom I got the sense that Vibecamp is amongst the “realest” expressions of who they are, and that their day-to-day life is, if not a waking dream, something filmed in black and white. This seems like it kind of sucks, and while I think my day-to-day life is a lot less bad than it could be, I did see a reflection of myself in their countenances. What I *didn’t* see in myself, upon further comparison, was *a reason* why this should be the case. I don’t have a strong familial connection to some tier-3 city in Middle America, nor do I have a career that requires me to clock in every day at a large regular polygon in Northern Virginia; if where I live is the problem, I can just fix it. I also got some useful confirmations at Vibecamp about where I think I ought to be going in terms of my career, and while neither of these changes in my life will be easy, I think they can be made to work together rather than treated as orthogonal. Having “quite a good time” for just a weekend was enough to remind me how much I want to live the kind of life where I’m close to my tribe, and of the fact I do have things to offer that tribe. These, I think, are the things that I ought to organise this stage of my life around.