Think of your typical 39-year-old man. He’s cranky, cynical, and wakes with an occasional crick in his neck. He likes Green Day’s early work, and his favorite film is “Pulp Fiction.” He doesn’t know what a performative male is, and truly doesn’t want to learn.
Most of all, though — particularly to those between the ages of 18 and 24 — he’s criminally, egregiously uncool.
With the Burning Man festival celebrating its 39th year in 2025 on the Playa of Black Rock City, it has matured from an unpermitted burst of outsider art on Baker Beach to a firmly middle-aged event that has its own for-profit LLC and porta-potties for more than 70,000 attendees.
But growing up has its costs. Changing demographics have made the festival older, wealthier, and less of a bucket-list item for the younger set of San Franciscans who previously made up Burning Man’s lifeblood.
Every year, the Burning Man organization conducts an annual survey of the event, dubbed the Black Rock City Census, from a random sample of attendees, and through a weighted online survey sent around afterward.
People between 30 and 39 make up the single largest category of Burning Man’s participants, and have for at least a decade. It makes sense; these are the folks who have the means, energy, and spreadsheet skills to organize a weeklong campout.
But a pronounced change — accelerated after the two-year pandemic pause — has come in the proportion of Burning Man-goers between 20 and 29. In 2014, this group made up 29.6% of attendees. Ten years later, that figure was down to 13.9%.
Over that same period, the proportion of attendees between 40 and 49 increased from 17.2% to 23.3%.
“As Black Rock City aged for another year, so did its population,” the census team wrote in a 2019 analysis, noting how the median age was 36 in 2019, compared to 33 in 2013.
The team also highlighted the event’s loss of younger people in exchange for the more wizened: “In 2013, we estimated 34.2% of the population to be under 30, and in 2019 our estimate has dropped to just 20.0%,” the analysis said. “The percentage of the population aged 60-plus has also changed over the years, nearly doubling from 5.0% in 2013 to 9.0% in 2019.”
It’s not just the ages of Burning Man attendees that have shifted over the years; it’s also their net worth.
In 2015, the largest portion of participants (nearly 30%) made between $50,000 and $99,000 per year. However, by 2024, that cohort was surpassed by those making between $100,000 and $299,999 a year. Around 40% of the Burning Man population last year fell into that income bracket, double the proportion in 2015.
While it’s cool (in theory) to be a starving artist, it’s significantly less cool to cosplay as one in a tutu and a chainmail bralette.
In previous eras, Burning Man meant the clearing out of techies from the Bay Area in favor of a week on the Playa. However, more and more local startup founders and investors are now choosing to skip the annual pilgrimage.
“The culture has shifted,” said Jenny He, founder and general partner at Position Ventures. “A lot of young founders I know don’t really drink or party. They’re heads down working long hours, building brands, and creating content.”
Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old cofounder of AI code review Greptile, said Burning Man hasn’t really been part of the zeitgeist since he moved to San Francisco in 2023.
Gupta, who has become a poster child of AI boom’s grindcore culture, summarized the current mood among young tech workers in San Francisco as incompatible with the Burner sensibility: “The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs.”
Many VCs, too, have forgone pausing their investing for the week. Daivik Goel, who is participating in the current Y Combinator batch, said he has back-to-back investor calls this week in the lead-up to Demo Day on Sept. 9.
“I don't think investors are taking time off,” Goel said. “The capital markets are just super competitive.”
One VC in his mid-20s said he hasn’t considered going to Burning Man yet because of how expensive it is to comfortably attend the festival. Another VC in her late 20s said that apart from a handful of crypto investors, no one in her circles is on the Playa this year.
Another founder, David Yue, said he and his friends feel Burning Man’s original essence doesn’t exist anymore, which has put them off planning a trip.
“The experience is so commodified,” said 24-year-old Yue, CEO and cofounder of AI tax platform Accordance. “The tickets are expensive, there are venture capital investor camps, and Instagram-worthy experiences. It’s offering the opposite of genuine human connection now.”
On X, people are past the point of debating if Burning Man is uncool now and have moved on to why. Some of the leading theories:
- Just like luxurious cafeterias and office pingpong tables, Burning Man is a zero-interest-rate era phenomenon now seen as naive and decadent.
- AI’s hardcore culture is so intense that no one wants to be away from their computer for a prolonged period.
- The ubiquity of smartphones has led to media coverage of the less glamorous parts of the festival, like extreme Orgy Dome-destroying weather.
Or perhaps the culprit is something much simpler. Burning Man — and the men and women who attend — is aging. And caravaning for hours to the desert and frolicking in dust storms for a week is just less fun when you’re older, especially with the prevailing sinking feeling about the state of the world.
Then again, that’s what the drugs are for.
