The reality check I didn't ask for.

Read time: 3 min.

Thursday evening. 33 degrees. Defqon.1

For those who don't know it: four days of hard dance music, 250,000 people, the kind of energy that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't felt it. It's my favorite weekend of the entire year. The one I look forward to every single June. The one that feels, by the time it arrives, completely inevitable.

We were deep into the first night. The music was loud, the crowd was alive, and everything felt exactly the way it was supposed to feel.

Then, just after midnight, someone backstage walked onto the stage with shaking hands and a voice that wasn't steady.

And said it was over.

What happened

The government had issued code red for the heat. 33 degrees, with Friday forecast to hit 38. No signs of cooling down. The festival couldn't continue safely.

Poof. Just like that. Gone.

I stood there in a crowd of thousands of people and felt something I don't have a clean word for. The dopamine and adrenaline of an entire day, the music still ringing in my ears, and then just. Nothing. Taken away in a single announcement.

Around me, people reacted in every direction. Most collapsed and cried. Some got angry. Some stood completely still, unable to process it. Someone held up their phone with the Instagram post: ‘’Defqon 1. Important Update’’. And slowly, one by one, everyone understood.

My reaction was pure disbelief.

Not grief yet. Just the strange feeling of something being taken away that you didn't even fully have yet.

The thing it made me realize

I've been going to Defqon for years.

And somewhere along the way, without noticing it, it stopped feeling like something I got to experience and started feeling like something that just happened every year. Something guaranteed. Something I was owed.

That's the quiet danger of things that always show up.

You stop being grateful for them before they arrive. You stop noticing them while they're happening. You treat them as fixed points in your year instead of gifts that could disappear at any moment.

The cancellation was jarring not just because it was disappointing. But because it made visible something I had let go invisible.

Nothing is guaranteed. Not even the things that have never let you down before.

Not the festival. Not the people. Not any of it.

What we did instead

We didn't go home.

That same night, we booked a few cabins in the Veluwe, then kept dancing until sunrise, determined to squeeze everything we could out of the one day we'd had. The next morning we packed up and drove out. A different kind of weekend than we'd planned. Quieter. Slower. Walks through the forest, a campfire, just being together without the noise.

And something happened that I didn't expect.

I got to know people I thought I already knew. The shared disappointment created a different kind of closeness. When the festival is running and the music is loud, you're all facing the same direction. When it gets cancelled at midnight and you're figuring out what to do next, you find out who people actually are.

That weekend on the Veluwe wasn't better than Defqon would have been.

But it was real in a way that Defqon, by now, almost isn't anymore.

The lesson I keep sitting with

The things you take for granted are the things most at risk of breaking your heart.

Not because they're fragile. But because you stopped seeing them. You stopped treating them as something you're lucky to have and started treating them as something you're simply entitled to.

The cancellation was a gift I didn't ask for.

A reminder that the festival, the friends, the music, the years of it, none of that was ever mine to keep. It was always borrowed. Always contingent. Always one announcement away from gone.

I'm going back next year. And I'll stand there differently.

Much love,

— Martijn

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