Are you ready to be awesome? Do you yearn to tear down your walls of suck? Looking for a guiding framework? Look no more. Nick Riggle, professional skater turned philosophical doctorate, presents “On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck,” with publication dated for Sept. 19.
Weaving pop culture, politics, history and sports, Riggle identifies the origins of awesomeness while defining its ethics. The University of San Diego professor touts a viewpoint that awesome people build a community by facilitating social openings. Those who suck demolish them. Riggle opens this inspiring outline for connecting community by highlighting Jeremy Fry, a “skinny ordinary young man at a Boston Celtic game with his mother,” pictured on the arena’s Fancam. Normal reactions to a spanning Fancam – smiling, waving, nudging friends and kissing significant others – didn’t apply to Fry. With Jon Bovi’s “Living On A Prayer” blaring in the background, Fry dove head first into creative expression. This kid decided to embody the spirt of Jon Bon Jovi.
Riggle writes, “… he bounced out of his seat and immediately assumed the role of Jon Bon Jovi in a music video – lip-synching, awkwardly dancing, and air-guitaring to the song while roaming among and interacting with a diverse and increasingly lively crowd.”
Enthralling, spirit-lifting, inspiring and of course awesome were but a few of the positive labels placed upon this seemingly, unassuming teen. “At least one commentator found a renewed faith in people,” writes Riggle. “Another saw Fry in the makings of a society-structural ideal: ‘This man should lead us.’”
Although the crowd enthusiastically and energetically joined Fry, one frumpy sad-sack nudged him away while mocking him with air kicks. Riggle writes what many Youtube observers agreed, the frump sucked. And let’s face it, no one wants to suck. But what differentiates awesome and suck, ergo Fry versus the frumpy, sad-sack, mean-kicking spectator? Riggle notes that the frump might be the product of his culture. Awesome cultures permit people to “freely” express themselves, thus “collectively” enhancing the quality of our lives. And we’re on the precipice of change.
He writes, “Our collective interest in being awesome (and not sucking) marks a new era in American culture, one that is shaped by social, political, and technological shifts.”
“On Being Awesome” details America’s social shifts from the 1930 emergence of “cool” to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The ‘60s social, cultural, and political changes paved an easier path for self-expression, affording everyone “our own sense of a life worth living.” However, a decline in community surfaced as a consequence. The transition, according to Riggle, served as both a positive and a negative. Riggle even adds the invention of the high-five in 1977 to his list of awesomeness cultural game-changers. Yes, the high-five was invented in the late ‘70s by a baseball player named Glenn Burke. So how does a high school dropout who became a successful professional skater navigate his way to philosophy? By exploring – completely unencumbered by a formal classroom – world religions, self-help manuals and philosophers the likes of Plato, Descartes and Buddha. “I was a high school dropout who never really cared about school,” he said. “Yet here I was in love with {Philosophy} the most venerable tradition in Western education.”
Riggle left the skating circuit to pursue a philosophical education. Interrupted only by a short stint as a musician, he spent “intense, yet blissful, semesters” at the University of California at Berkley where he received a bachelor of arts in Philosophy. A PhD from New York University followed suit. Today the awesome author serves as a professor of philosophy at USD where “I can skate and philosophize all year-round.”
Among his many philosophical awesome epithets stands a warning that marketing and social media exploit awesomeness by selling the “spectacle” instead of the encouragement to be awesome. Marketers “repackage” and “distort” all that “embodies the ethics of awesomeness” for the sake of sales. Riggle notes that a life spent online is a life spent opting out of dynamic social situations because we “harbor a nagging feeling that there’s something better to do or look at online.” “It’s important to remain connected to real awesomeness, which is something we can’t simply enjoy on TV or the Internet, we have to create it for ourselves, in our own lives, neighborhoods, workplaces, and so on,” he writes. According to Riggle, being awesome is liberating. “Awesomeness is the bell that a free people must endlessly sound; it’s the caffeine we must crave lest we get headachy, tired, cranky – the small price we must pay to become human again and again,” he writes. “The ethics of awesome is an ethics of aspiration and communal imagination: The imagination must be cultivated; the culture must be imagined.”
“On Being Awesome” covers such topics as the basics and modes of awesome and suckiness, articulating awesome, creative community builders, introverts and expectations, be cool, be not cool, individuality and community – tension and resolution, altruism, art, athleticism and a civic life. Riggle concludes by questioning the reader, “From our current vantage point, we don’t really know what life would look like if we were more awesome more often. What would we care to think, read and write about? What would we love to do? Whom would we love to be around? What kinds of communities and neighborhoods would we build? What kind of movements and collectives would we start or support. What kinds of cultures and societies would we create? I don’t have the answers to these questions and we can only find them together. One thing is for sure, I’m down to find out.”