Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
At stage five, you discover how identity is constructed. You realize that your values are not terminal, but they are instrumental to achieving a world that you like and aesthetics that you prefer. And the more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed. And you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction is a costume.
And you should be able to have agency over that costume. It's useful to be a costume. It tells something to others and allows to interface in roles. But being locked into this is a big limitation.
In some sense, I learned a lot about costumes at Burning Man. Before that, I did not really appreciate costumes and saw them more as uniforms. Like, wearing a suit, if you are working in a bank or if you are trying to get startup funding from a VC in Switzerland, then you dress up in a particular way.
And this is mostly to show the other side that you are willing to play by the rules and you understand what the rules are. But there is something deeper. When you are at Burning Man, your costume becomes self-expression and there is no boundary to the self-expression.
You're basically free to wear what you want, to express other people what you feel like this day and what kind of interactions you want to have.
That's very hard to say because the costume also depends on what other people see in the costume. And this depends on the context that the other people understand. And you have to create something, if you want to, that is legible to the other side. And that means something to yourself.
Some people do, but I think that once you realize that you wear a costume at Burning Man, a variety of costumes, realize that you cannot not wear a costume. Basically, everything that you hear and present to others is something that is to some degree an addition to what you are deep inside.
It does allow you to understand why other people have different identities from yours. And it allows you to understand that the difference between people who vote for different parties and might have very different opinions and different value systems is often the accident of where they are born and what happened after that to them and what traits they got before they were born.
And at some point you realize the perspective where you understand that everybody could be you in a different timeline if you just flip those bits. How many costumes do you have?
Yeah, of course.
It's just a matter of energy and interest. When you are wearing your pajamas and you switch out of your pajamas into, say, a work shirt and pants, you're making a costume change, right? And if you are putting on a gown, you're making a costume change.
You could, if that's what you're into. There are people which have multiple personalities for interaction in multiple worlds, right? So if somebody works in a store and you put up a storekeeper personality when you're presenting yourself at work, you develop a sub-personality for this. And the social persona for many people is in some sense a puppet that they're playing like a marionette.
And if they play this all the time, they might forget that there is something behind this. There's something what it feels like to be in your skin. And I guess it's very helpful if you're able to get back into this. And for me, the other way around is relatively hard. For me, it's pretty hard to learn how to play consistent social roles. For me, it's much easier just to be real.
No, it's not quite the same. So basically, when you are wearing a costume at Burning Man and say you are an extraterrestrial prince, there's something where you are expressing, in some sense, something that's closer to yourself than the way in which you hide yourself behind standard clothing when you go out in the city, in the default world.
And so this costume that you're wearing at Burning Man allows you to express more of yourself. And you have a shorter distance of advertising to people what kind of person you are, what kind of interaction you would want to have with them. And so you get much earlier into media stress.
And I believe it's regrettable that we do not use the opportunities that we have with custom-made clothing now to wear costumes that are much more
uh stylish that are much more custom-made that are not necessarily part of a fashion in which you express which milieu you're part of and how up-to-date you are but you also express how you are as an individual and what you want to do today and how you feel today and what you intend to do about it well isn't it easier now with in the digital world to um
It's even better if you make them yourself.
It's not about easy. It's about how to get it right. And for me, the first Burning Man experience, I got adopted by a bunch of people in Boston who dragged me to Burning Man. And we spent a few weekends doing costumes together. And that was an important part of the experience where the camp bonded, that people got to know each other.
And we basically grew into the experience that we would have later.
Showing 81–100 of 510 · page 5 of 26
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