I'm Running The Bay Area Secular Solstice

Hope you come!

I am running this year’s Bay Area Secular Solstice: I wrote the script and will be MCing. It is on Friday, December 20th at 7pm Pacific Time. You can get tickets for the in-person show here or watch it on livestream for free here.

Secular Solstice is a yearly holiday tradition in the rationalist community.¹ We sing, we tell stories, we think about our lives and humanity’s past and future, and hopefully we’re inspired to be a little more determined and a little kinder. You absolutely do not have to be a rationalist to attend—I know a lot of people who aren’t rationalists who have gotten a lot out of past Solstices.

My Solstice is about being an ordinary person, which is to say weak and powerless in the face of problems that are much too big for you to do anything about. If you are an ordinary person who feels scared and helpless, I hope my Solstice will have something to say to you.²

I’ve been planning this Solstice for literal years—the first conversations I had about it were in 2019. Running it is like cutting myself open, bleeding on the page, and then presenting the splatter to an audience of hundreds so that they can judge how pretty the red is. It is sincere and earnest and more than a little embarrassing. I hope you will come.

If nothing else, I will make you cry about a steamship. I think there was one audition for that speech where the person auditioning didn’t start crying halfway through.

1. It’s normally called a “ritual” but to me that sounds like it involves ominous chanting and possibly a human sacrifice to Cthulhu.

2. If you aren’t, there’s always next year!