Delivering Happiness

party I had been planning for months was going to be my gift to the tribe.
Ever since selling LinkExchange, I’d committed to living by the
philosophy that experiences were much more important to me than material
things. Most people assumed that I would have gone out and bought a fancy
and expensive car, but I was content with my Acura Integra.
I already lived in a fourteen-hundred-square-foot loft on the seventh
floor of our building, and I had found out a few months earlier that a thirty-
five-hundred-square-foot penthouse unit on the eighth floor was available
for sale. It was unit number 810.
I had no desire to move, but when I saw the layout of the 810 loft, I
knew I had to buy it so that it could become the new gathering space for our
tribe. There was one small bedroom and three thousand square feet of wide-
open space. It was the perfect place for partying.
I bought the 810 loft, not because I wanted to own more property, and
not because I thought of it as a real estate investment. I bought 810 so I
could architect our parties and gatherings. Owning the loft would ultimately
enable more experiences.
After successfully buying 810 in a bidding war against two other people,
I started working on converting the loft into my vision of what it could one
day become. During college, watching the hit TV show Friends with my
roommates was a regular weekly event. I remembered how the characters in
the show seemed to always gather at the local coffee shop called Central
Perk to hang out and meet other people. I wanted 810 to become our tribe’s
own private version of Central Perk. And we needed to figure out a cool
name for 810, instead of just calling it 810.

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I envisioned our friends gathering in 810 on Sundays for champagne
brunches. I envisioned 810 as being the afterparty meet-up spot after a night
out at a club, bar, or rave. And I envisioned converting 810 into our own
private nightclub. The first official party of 810 would be on Saturday,
December 11, 1999. At midnight, I would turn twenty-six. My birthday
would be the perfect excuse to throw an inaugural party for 810.
I made sure to stock plenty of Red Bull.
I
’d spent weeks preparing for my birthday party. Our tribe had attended
several raves in the months leading up to my birthday. I remember the first
rave party I had attended earlier that year, when I didn’t really know what a
rave was. All I knew was they played a lot of techno and house music. I had
gone to nightclubs before where they played the same type of music that
they played at raves, and I remember finding that music really annoying and
not understanding why the biggest rooms in all the clubs always seemed to
play that type of music. There were no words to the music, and it seemed
like it was just the same repetitive beat playing over and over again
incessantly. I just didn’t understand the appeal of electronic music.
Knowing that it would be the same type of music, I wasn’t too excited
about going to a warehouse rave, but because everyone else in our tribe
wanted to go, I decided to tag along.
We all drove to a gigantic empty warehouse that seemed like it was in
the middle of nowhere. There were hundreds of cars parked outside the
warehouse, and we could hear the repetitive thumping of the electronic
techno music as we waited outside in line. I secretly wondered how long we
would be staying there, as I would have really preferred a venue with music
that I recognized and had heard on the radio. After waiting in line for
twenty minutes, we finally turned the corner and walked into the
warehouse.
What I experienced next changed my perspective forever.
S
treams of giant green laser beams were shooting throughout the entire
warehouse, which was the size of ten football fields. Fog machines helped
create a sense of dreamlike surrealism as everyone faced the DJ and moved
in unison to the beat of the music. Cans of Red Bull were strewn

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everywhere, and ultraviolet black lights caused the fluorescent decorations
on the walls and ceilings to glow as if they were alien plants transported
from another universe.
But it wasn’t just about the decorations, or the black lights, or the fog
machines, or the lasers, or the massiveness of the warehouse. Something
else about the scene and moment elicited an emotional response from my
entire being that was completely unexpected, and I couldn’t really place my
finger on exactly what it was or why I felt that way.
I tried to analyze what was different about this scene compared with the
nightclub scene that I was more accustomed to. Yes, the decorations and
lasers were pretty cool, and yes, this was the largest single room full of
people dancing that I had ever seen. But neither of those things explained
the feeling of awe that I was experiencing that was leaving me speechless.
As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational
person in a group, I was surprised to feel myself swept with an
overwhelming sense of spirituality—not in the religious sense, but a sense
of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the
universe.
There was a feeling of no judgment, and as I glanced around the
warehouse, I saw each person as an individual to be appreciated for just
being himself or herself, dancing to the music.
As I tried to analyze what was going on in more detail, I realized that the
dancing here was different from the dancing I usually witnessed in
nightclubs. Here, there was no sense of self-consciousness or feeling that
anyone was dancing to be seen dancing, whereas in nightclubs, there was
usually the feeling of being on display somehow. In nightclubs, people
usually dance with each other. Here, it seemed that almost everyone was
facing the same direction. Everyone was facing the DJ, who was elevated
up on stage, as if he was channeling his energy to the crowd. It almost felt
as if everyone was worshipping the DJ.
The entire room felt like one massive, united tribe of thousands of
people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group. People weren’t
dancing to the music so much as the music seemed like it was simply
moving through everyone. The steady wordless electronic beats were the
unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd. It was as if the existence
of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single

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unifying group consciousness, the same way a flock of birds might seem
like a single entity instead of a collection of individual birds. Everyone in
the warehouse had a shared purpose. We were all contributors to the
collective rave experience.
I didn’t know it at the time, but ten years later I would learn that
research from the field of the science of happiness would confirm that the
combination of physical synchrony with other humans and being part of
something bigger than oneself (and thus losing momentarily a sense of self)
leads to a greater sense of happiness, and that the rave scene was simply the
modern-day version of similar experiences that humans have been having
for tens of thousands of years.
In the moment though, I felt a sense of experiential epiphany. It swept
through my entire being. In that instant, I suddenly understood the appeal of
the techno music. I couldn’t simply listen to it the way I listened to music
on the radio. I had to let it flow through me in the context of a mind-set that
I hadn’t really experienced until just now. It was like someone had
bestowed on me the Rosetta Stone of techno music, and no amount of
verbal explanation would have helped me understand it. I had to experience
it for myself.
And in that one instant, I did. I had awakened. I had been transformed.
Finally, after all these years, I understood what the music was all about.