As another year passes and new years fades, festival season approaches and the cravings for an exhilarating adventure begin when post festival depression (PFD) kicks in. When we think of festivals we reminisce about how the music and positive vibes made us feel an uncontrollable need to keep that moment alive for as long as we are able to. We aren’t sure when we will get this incredible feeling of escaping reality again, and this aggravates our PFD.
When we’re at a festival we feel free and live in the moment. We feel unreal happiness, and everyone around you is looking out for one another and in that moment, we feel like one big family making unforgettable memories. With these memories, we return to the real world and can’t help but remember those moments. It becomes difficult to separate real life and our festival lives, which leads us to investigating which festival to attend next. Balancing reality and our musical cravings can be a challenge.
The process of actually getting to the festival can be tricky, stressful, and not to mention expensive, but to an avid festival goer we believe that listening to our favorite artists live is well worth the struggle we go through to make it happen. Also, having a good festival experience depends immensely on the people we choose to attend the event with; this will diminish the PFD indefinitely. The dream festival group can go with the flow and are excited about expanding their taste in music. Being interested in the new talent and music that will be at the event is essential to having a good time at any festival. Undeniably there are many styles that artists bring to the table in one genre alone. It’s one big musical experiment that everyone gets to listen to firsthand.
Everyone wants to experience the vibes in the crowd when the DJ plays the one song everyone hoped they would play, such as Alison Wonderland playing “Happy Place” before the ball drops to open the new year at SnowGlobe Music Festival. We want to tell the story about how it felt when we experienced it for ourselves. Let’s not forget the magnificent crowd. They’re always looking out for one another, and the abundance of positive vibes going around begins to be contagious. Everyone accepts you for who you are, and this helps everyone have a good time and create happy memories that won’t soon be forgotten. When we are in the thick of this environment we forget about how much money we just spent and soon get lost in the moment right then and there. When we are at a festival, reality seems to escape us as we enter our own version of a happy place.
The amount of freedom we feel at a festival is one of the main reasons we can tolerate how much money we spend to attend these events. We always say we are “broke college kids” but then a “can’t miss” festival comes up, such as Coachella or Lightning in a Bottle, in addition to the lineup being just right and we can’t miss out, creating a serious FOMO, and suddenly we have cash to spend, even if it’s our food money for the rest of the month. The lengths we will go to just smell festival air is extreme, but it’s always worth it to satisfy our PFD.
We crave the intense stimulation we feel through the music, giving us energy and enhancing our spirituality letting us learn more about ourselves and letting us bond with others around us. We want these moments to last forever, and sometimes it feels as though these moments really will last forever. We will always keep the memories we make at a festival near to our musical souls where reality can’t touch them.
Having PFD is not only a sadness of not being at a festival, but it’s also about how much you crave the experience, and this craving is hard to ignore when it’s pounding in your head when you’re trying to focus on reality. The hardest part is coming home and realizing that the festival is over and so is the fun. After a few days of recovery, we go looking for the next festival and repeat the cycle of getting the squad together and raging some more, keeping in mind that our bank accounts will forgive us later.