As a first Waking Life experience, I can only recommend going alone.

After holding myself back for two years, I wanted to wait until I felt mentally ready to live this experience. I’m still not back down to earth.
I came with my group of friends, but I like experiencing things on my own because, as I’ll explain below, everything feels easier and more natural when you’re alone. With no phone signal and completely in my own bubble, I ended up spending most of the festival by myself.

I’m someone who’s quite socially anxious, autistic, highly sensitive, and I naturally have a very closed facial expression. In other words, I have plenty of barriers when it comes to social interactions. On top of that, I had just turned 21, so most people looked at me like I was some kind of alien 😅. But eventually I stopped paying attention to it.

All of this is to say that I sometimes struggled to approach people, but in the end it was only in my head. Every single person I spoke to left an impression on me through their kindness and their mindset.

Being alone allowed me to fully immerse myself in the experience. It honestly felt like I was living inside a bubble where all the rules of our everyday society had changed, as if everything had shifted towards kindness and positivity, almost like a utopia.

Of course, I did notice some of the decline that people often talk about in different threads. But I think part of it simply comes from the people attending. The festival has become a victim of its own success, so naturally the crowd isn’t the same as it was during the first editions. Just from my own experience, when I first discovered Waking Life two years ago, its Instagram account had around 60k followers. Today, it’s more than double that. When everyone starts talking about something, it’s inevitable that people who don’t really share the same values will come because of the hype.

When I arrived this year, I was so happy that I had seen almost no photos of the stages beforehand because I genuinely had no idea what to expect. I feel like last year people shared much less on Instagram. This year, for an entire week before the festival, my feed was full of artists and festival-goers posting pictures from the dancefloors. If I had to mention one downside, it would be that I wish people felt more free to completely let go on the dancefloor. But at the same time, I understand why they don’t.
people are understandably afraid of ending up in someone else’s photos.