Raving can be a very good and healthy habit, if and when your focus is making personal connections through music.
I am a firm believer that good habits are key to a more fulfilled life.
We become what we habitually study and focus on. We are what we habituate. By doing small, yet important, things over and over, we can achieve enormous changes without massive effort or magic formulas.
Small adjustments, good systems, the right processes. There is nothing more powerful than a good habit.
If you’ve been raving for years, or perhaps even decades, you have likely developed specific habits when it comes to rave day. Why? Because while raving is enormously beneficial to mental health, there is no denying that it can take a toll on the body and mind if done irresponsibly. When we are in our late teens and early-to-mid 20s it’s easy to forego good habits, hoping that the strength of our youth, and the recovery of our bodies, push us through the bad habits we choose instead.
So although staying healthy while raving remains of paramount importance, what I want to talk about today is the actual positive habit of raving in the first place. Making habitual connections with people on the dance floor is one of these incredibly powerfully positive habits that can change lives.
Relationships are key to a good life. We cannot neglect them. Our parents, our kids, our spouses and our friends and co-workers, but also the stranger you see every day at the gym or the ravers you share dance floors with every weekend: these are people that make your life worth living. We are social beings and are on this earth to make human connections.
This is why we feel good when we make dinner for a loved ones, or gift a toy to a child. This is why we feel happy when we help out a raver in need, or share a smile with a stranger on the dance floor when the DJ drops a particularly banging track. There is a reason why we get a hit of dopamine every time we share rave moments with our rave squad, or meet someone new at the warehouse that we know we will be sharing rave moments with in the months to come.
Proper parties are more than just parties. They are community. They are an opportunity to meet, to connect, to learn, to influence and to touch others in ways that we cannot do elsewhere. Our community is such because the vast majority of people that are in it see it as so, and constantly work, consciously or otherwise, to bring a slice of their own goodness to the community for the community’s sake.
Nature produced us to connect with one another, and in House + Techno we find that common ground for connection, and a bond that unites us on a human and spiritual level that goes beyond the music itself, but that wouldn’t be possible without it.
Raving has given me the opportunity of making connections with the most important and positively influential people that are part of my life, with the exception of my blood-related family of course. If you ask me why I rave, I would answer that beyond my deep love for the music, it’s because of the deep, incredibly personal connections that I have made, and that I strive to make every time I am on a dance floor as a raver and/or event curator.
When you go to the next rave pay attention to your fellow ravers. Be good, do good and look out for each other. Say thank you to the staff putting on the event, or to a raver that is kind to you. Say excuse me if you’re going through the crowd. Kindly respect the simple rules promoters put in place to keep the dance floor vibe alive.
Put your phones away and connect. Don’t let technology take away the one thing that makes raving special, and that is the connections that we make on the dance floor. House + Techno connect people through music. We must never lose that connection, and that’s why we ask that you not take photos and videos on the dance floor.
Cover photo by @subjekmedia
