Now I notice people using them that way lot, but it’s one those conceptual connections you might not notice without some good old a priori reflection. It wasn’t long before I noticed, even in my own idiolect, that “awesome” and “sucks” were related as antonyms. My sense was that standard moral theories don’t capture suckiness-that it also had a kind of social import that was worth investigating. It seemed to be a distinctive critique of someone to say that they, or something they did, “sucked”. I started to notice that “awesome” is often being used in a distinctive social sense to talk about people and actions that bring people together in a certain way.Īround the same time I was also wondering about the contemporary significance of “sucks”. In a Socratic spirit I started wondering what was going on with “awesome” and whether there was anything to gain from a philosophical inquiry into its contemporary significance. I’m all for tasty sandwiches but I’d rather have an awesome one. How did you become interested in awesomeness, and what is it, exactly?Ī good person is great but an awesome person-they’re on another level. Riggle N (2017) (05:09) On Being Awesome - A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck An accessible and entertaining lens for navigating the ethics of our time, On Being Awesome provides a new and inspiring framework for understanding ourselves and creating meaningful connections in our everyday lives. Put more simply: You suck.įrom street art to folk singers, Proust to the great etiquette writer Emily Post, President Obama to former Los Angeles Dodger Glenn Burke, Riggle draws on pop culture, politics, history, and sports to explore the origins of awesome, and delves into the nuances of what it means to suck and why it’s so important to strive for awesomeness. And if you’re a cheapskate, self-promoter, killjoy, or douchebag, you’re the type of person who shuts social openings down. Awesome people excel at creating social openings that encourage expressions of individuality and create community. We all know people who are awesome and people who suck, but what do we really mean by these terms? Have you ever been chill or game? Do you rock or rule? If so, then you’re tapped into the ethics of awesomeness. But don’t miss its profound ambition, which is to show how philosophy unearths the structure of ordinary language, defines the meaning of life in routine business, and poses the question of how best to live.” -Aaron James, author of Assholes: A Theory “Nick Riggle’s fun book is ‘awesome’ by its own definition. In this lively treatise, pro-skater-turned-philosopher Nick Riggle presents a theory of awesomeness (and its opposite, suckiness) that’s both sharply illuminating and more timely than ever

On being awesome riggle