Inextricably linked to the Electronic Dance Music genre and culture. Fatigue. It is something that every single person who has ever immersed themselves in Techno, in House, in the loft discos and the warehouses, in the afterhour hovels and the Ibiza superclubs knows very well. "Dancing the night away". A cliché if there ever was one, and something all of us have experienced at one time or another. The Wee Hours, the Small Hours, the Dark Hours are traditionally meant for one thing: sleeping. Every human being needs to regenerate (some more often than others) and night time has always been the time to do that. Our culture chooses to ignore that convention. Or consciously kick against it.

Often heard at Bar25 over the years, nearing the crossover from Sunday to Monday: "Doesn't anyone in Berlin have a job? How can they stay here for the whole weekend and into the next week?" People in the Berlin nightlife culture have found a way around the inevitable crash and fatigue of a Monday. One ex-girlfriend demanded that her job give her Mondays off. One friend went on the dole. Many start wishful careers as DJs themselves or as professional bartenders. What ties them all together? If you ask them how they are, the answer usually involves being tired. Fatigue

The inevitable crash always comes. You can only push your body so hard for so long. Some people measure that time in hours, some in days, some in years. The fact that artificial stimulants play a large role in many peoples diets doesn't help. While I personally don't partake anymore, I remember what it is like to flit from party to party, dance floor to dance floor, disco to disco, all over town. Running mechanically on an incessant 4/4 beat that seems to feel new every 5 minutes, yet at the same time stretch infinitely in time in either direction. Until the last of your friends says "I really need to go, I have to be at the doctor tomorrow". And you are stuck either going home yourself or finding a 24 hour bar where you can drink away the last of your energy. Which is only going to make the next time you wake up worse.

Who hasn't sat in front of the television, watching a movie slack jawed only because anything more intellectually stimulating would probably be too difficult. Who hasn't ordered food to be delivered, greasy and full of the salt you have been sweating out for the past 2 days, since boiling water to cook noodles would be a challenging task, on par with the 12 Herculean Labors. Fatigue

Recently I have been experiencing a different kind of fatigue. Party Fatigue. I am tired. Tired of going out, tired of saying hello, tired of waking up later than I meant to, tired of meeting people only in a darkened room where conversation is mostly limited to things that concern what is going on in that and other darkened rooms around the world. Living in Berlin in the party scene will age you ten-fold from living anywhere else. And so, it makes sense that becoming jaded and unappreciative of the utopia we live in will hit you ten-fold as well. I have watched most of my "co-workers" who play more often than a couple times a month slowly become more and more fatigued with something that once drove them in a way nothing else ever has. Forget sleep, it seems like battle fatigue. So what is the solution, the cure? Forget sleep, we need a Vacation.

I suggest the entirety of nightlife takes one year off from artificial stimulants. I wonder what that would change, culturally. There is only one way to find out.

Fatigue

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Written by Pablo Roman-Alcala for SLIM Mag August issue and Sweat Lodge Radio.