Why Festivals, Football, and Other Shared Events Make Us Happy

New Research Shows Why We All Need Collective Gatherings More Than Ever

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This week Burning Man, the collective celebration of art, freedom, and self-expression in the Nevada desert, returns after a two-year absence; the U.S. Open ramps up in New York City; football begins its six-month grip on the American imagination; and city after city across the country will wind-down summer festivities and start gearing up for pumpkin-spice hullabaloos.

But this summer has not been all good for collective events: Scores of musical groups, from The Rolling Stones to Aerosmith, had to nix tours for Covid; a beloved concert series in Atlanta was shut down out of concerns that under the state’s new gun laws, guests could bring in concealed weapons; and Shawn Mendes ended his world tour citing mental health concerns.

This rocky restart to our annual calendar of festivals, picnics, reunions, and homecomings is a reminder of how much these collective events mean to our fragile sense of community, already battered by heightened tensions over politics, public health, and a general mistrust.

But a new wave of research suggests that if we let our private misgivings about the state of our civic union to spill over and poison the few occasions of joint camaraderie we have left, we lose much more than our communal identity. We lose the chance to boost our own happiness.

Here, based on this research, are three benefits of attending communal gatherings:

Photo credit MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images

1. Connection to the Self

Because we may have a memory of attending shared events in the past, we might feel as if we know how attending one of these events today will impact us. But as the philosopher L.A. Paul argues in her book, Transformative Experience, the events themselves actually change us in ways we can’t fully anticipate.

“Oftentimes, we are able to combine and simulate relevant past experiences as an approximation, just as we might get a decent sense of how an unfamiliar dish will taste based on the ingredients listed on a menu,” she writes. But transformative events are different: They surprise us, jolt us out of our everyday selves, open us up to new selves.

William Swann, a professor at the University of Texas, and colleagues, write in their paper, “When Group Membership Gets Personal,” that by connecting with individuals with whom we have no personal relationships, we gain a heightened sense of personal agency and confidence.

Group experiences don’t just make us feel better about the group; they make us feel better about ourselves.

Photo credit David McNew/Newsmakers

2. Connected to the Group

Writing more than a century ago, the sociologist Emile Durkheim first crystallized the idea that participating in shared activities gives us the feeling of “collective effervescence.” More recently, Eshin Jolly, a brain researcher at Dartmouth, and three colleagues, have shown how individuals who participate even minimally in such events feel a greater attachment to their fellow participants. A primary reason: People love talking about their experiences as they're going through them, and their fellow particiants are a captive audience.

Today, people have an even greater need for such events, the researchers argue, because more and more of our daily experiences happen online. “Humans are increasingly leading social lives that do not rely on in-person interactions." In-person interactions not only provide an alternative to those online interactions, they actually enhance those online relationships by providing us occasions to share how we were changed by our offline experiences.

The real-life experience not only improve our lives by allowing us to have new experiences and make new friends, in other words, they improve our lives by allowing us to tell our existing friends about those new experiences and friends. Everyone feels like they've attended that game or spent time in the desert.

Photo credit Fred Marie/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images

3. Connected to the World

Perhaps the most intriguing finding from this new crop of research is how collective events actually manage to remake our relationships to the world.

A team of researchers led by Daniel Yudkin at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this spring showing that people who report transformative experiences at such gatherings feel more connected with all of humanity and are more willing to help even distant strangers. After conducting field studies of more than 1,200 people attending multi-day mass gatherings, including Burning Man, Lightning in a Bottle, and Dirty Bird, the researchers found that two-thirds of participants reported feeling “radically changed,” including those who did not expect to have those emotions when they attended the event.

“We’ve long known that festivals, pilgrimages, and ceremonies make people feel more bonded with their own group,” Daniel Yudkin told Phys.org. “Here we show that experiences at secular mass gatherings also have the potential to expand the boundaries of moral concern beyond one’s own group.”

He added, "The findings are an important reminder of what we've missed in years of pandemic isolation.”

And that may be the most important lesson of all: Having been forced away from spending time with others over the last few years, we all could use a correction. After all, as Charlotte Bronte said nearly 200 years ago, “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”

Here's to finding occasions this fall to re-taste the happiness of togetherness.

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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

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Cover art credit Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images