The Not-So-Lonely Hedonist

What the hell are we doing here, and what does it mean to lead a fulfilling life?

Perhaps it’s due to living through Covid-19 and its aftermath that I’m significantly horrified at humanity’s social, political, environmental, and economic challenges. Whatever the reason, I find myself asking the big existential questions more than ever.

These are not questions I’m alone in wondering—the existence of university philosophy departments confirms this. Just pop into any late-night, booze-and-weed-soaked bonfire and eavesdrop on the chatter.

But these are questions that, at least in the United States, have been largely cast aside during the 20th century in formal philosophy—until recently, University of San Diego aesthetics professor and author Nick Riggle tells me. We’re discussing his book, This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive (published December 2022), which provides a working manual for thinking through “The Question.”

To wit: How are we, as sentient beings, supposed to value a life we did not choose to live? We’re here, sure as we can pinch our skins, but why should we “want it, love it, care for it, make it mine?” Riggle asks.

Befitting an academic, Riggle tackles this quandary as a lecturer might, by speaking directly to readers in his text, walking them through each chapter conversationally and lyrically. The chapters appear as individually themed essays on life in general, time, the body, family, the concept of a single day, and, of course, beauty. This sprawling format is intentional.

“I don’t think, philosophically, that ‘The Question’ has a direct answer,” he says. “We don’t have enough information to have one. We don’t know enough… [W]ho we are, what we’re doing here, what the universe is. It’s all one great mystery.”

To help untangle this mystery, Riggle offers real-life examples of how to think about these concepts through relatable anecdotes about parenthood and his middle-class upbringing. He also interrogates the futility and vagueness of common inspirational phrases like “live like there’s no tomorrow,” “seize the day,” and “you only live once.”

He argues they all imply that life is precious and therefore inspire either recklessness or over-careful preservation. Both of these are overkill for the nuances of everyday life and recognizing the beauty and, consequently, the value therein.

Beauty as a subject, and the search for it, is what anchors Riggle’s entire philosophy (and book). To him, it’s very much in the eye of the beholder, something subjective and highly individual, with meaning beyond just pleasure and visual satisfaction. There’s also an inherently communal aspect. The personal and public aspects engage in a feedback loop that creates aesthetic value.

Riggle, who lives in El Cerrito, is a good candidate to explore the value of life: He’s lived many already. He dropped out of high school to pursue a professional inline skating career that took him to the X-Games and other international competitions and found him hanging out with Eminem, Dave Matthews Band, and Randy Savage by age 20.

Dissatisfied with living life rooted more in the corporeal, surrounded by material pleasures in a body-punishing discipline, he moved on to other pursuits. He got his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley after starting at community college, earned his PhD in philosophy at New York University, became a professor, married, and, more recently, became a father. There was also a stint as the head of a hip-hop-slash-folk music group in-between.

So why ask The Question now?

The book touches on other disciplines, but it’s fair to say that it is broadly an existentialist work. Academically speaking, this worldview fell out of favor after the writings of Søren Kirkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Paul Sartre, and others preoccupied with teasing out the meaning of human existence initially became popular.

For many, existentialism is too nebulous and tedious to consider. In San Diego, where championing good vibes sometimes trumps everything else, it’s easy to see how it rarely elevates beyond that aforementioned bonfire conversation. For Riggle, fatherhood provided a good opportunity to dig in.

Zooming out more widely, after decades of the decline of organized religion and the rise of buffet-style spiritualism linked to astrology, crystals, yoga, and other hodgepodge practices and philosophies, people are perhaps more primed than they have been in a while to consider what he’s offering.

Frankly, this line of thinking—and to know it’s again becoming en vogue—is refreshing, particularly in a city with crushing economic and social inequality. Even Foreign Policy argued in favor of it in a 2019 article, declaring, “French philosophy came to define the postwar era. As U.S. politics get ever more absurd, it’s time for a comeback.”

We may have a harder time addressing the material comforts of every human on earth, but at least we can try to provide a roadmap for mentally riding the waves. Or, as Riggle puts it, “engaging in aesthetic life [is] a way of keeping in touch with the value of being alive.”

Katie Hafner was on a bike tour through Italy with her daughter when she got to chatting with one of the guides. She asked if they’d ever had someone be such a problem that they were uninvited from future trips. Turns out, they had.

“The example was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and that’s when my daughter turned to me and she said, ‘Mom, that’s a novel,’” Hafner says. “Most rational people would just say, yes, it is, and leave it at that. But I just decided I needed to write it.” Hafner won’t reveal what that banned bicyclist did—it spoils the ending of the book—but she managed to turn the incredible twist into her first novel, The Boys, published by Spiegel & Grau this year. The book has earned rave reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Boys is a breeze to read, with characters who feel alive—thanks to small details like her male lead Ethan loving to re-engineer Furby toys and his girlfriend Barb wanting to get married at The Mütter Museum, which celebrates the oddities of the human body. The characters feel like friends you love catching up with—like when Barb can’t decide what to order at a restaurant, Ethan breaks out his impersonation of Lieutenant Columbo: “Barb, do you mind if I call you Barb? No disrespect intended, ma’am, but I’ve been watching you study this menu and I see your eyes keep coming back to the same thing.”

The plot takes you from a charming and totally believable meeting between the introverted Ethan and everyone-loves-her Barb through their marriage and eventual struggles, especially during Covid. The wife becomes a go-to expert, spending much of her time conducting Zoom media interviews, which drives her husband crazy. Plot twist: Hafner’s husband is Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, who became a real-life Covid media celebrity.

Hafner now lives in San Francisco but has deep roots in San Diego. She worked for a time as a business reporter at The San Diego Union (pre -Tribune) covering General Dynamics and the aerospace industry. She first moved here in 1965 when her mom was a mathematics graduate student at UCSD and lived in graduate student housing on Torrey Pines Road while going to Scripps Elementary.

“My mother had no money, so it was really a scrappy existence,” she says. Then in middle school, she moved to the East Coast to live with her dad. But Hafner returned in 1975 to go to UCSD. She says she badly wished she could instead go to Dartmouth, but her family couldn’t afford it. She studied German literature—or, as she likes to tell people, “I studied Kafka—I was obsessed,” and that prepared her for writing her own fiction. She’s previously written half a dozen nonfiction titles.

“I was completely taken by how Kafka in his diaries would go from something that was a pure observation, like, ‘I ate lunch today,’ and in the middle of a diary entry go into one of these crazy inventions of his, like, and then I turned into a bug,” she says. “I felt like a trespasser upon the inner life of this man.” While she doesn’t emulate the surrealism in Kafka’s work, his willingness to stretch the bounds of reality inspired Hafner to stretch from journalism into fiction.

“I’m very interested in when our minds go to fiction,” she says. “A lot of what interests me in fiction is you look at something and you think to yourself, what if that happened?”

My 15-year-old daughter tried to steal our car this week, so I’m ready to become a NASCAR dad. It would be appropriate discipline. We just relocated to a very nice suburb within walking distance of her high school. The suburbs are like living in a Tesla commercial. I am pretty far from the wealthiest dad in this neighborhood (I am, in fact, the least wealthy dad in this ’hood), more than a few engineering degrees short of being in the running.

I’m fairly certain watching NASCAR is a violation of our HOA and a violation of my daughter’s emotional HOA. But NASCAR hits San Diego this weekend and I have a fever I’ve never felt before. I want to watch 111 drivers do dangerous things in cars and trucks on an active military base in the ocean. Since my lifelong exposure to NASCAR is limited to Talladega Nights and every single iteration of the movie Cars, I can only base my plan of attack on oafish stereotypes.

So while other neighbor dads are sizing bubble jackets for their golf simulators, I’m gonna grow a Ricky Bobby, run the extension cord for the TV out into the carport we share with six other condos, fill a cooler with a proper 80-20 split of Hamm’s and Mountain Dew, treat a lawn chair like an ADU, and spend a few hours yelling ohsheeeit as if it’s a single, nine-syllable word.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Trackhouse Racing (@teamtrackhouse)

The quality parents in our neighborhood seem to be able to sense anytime a vehicle breaches the 6 MPH threshold, so I should gather a crowd pretty fast. They may come over with strongly worded emails in their hearts, but one glimpse of  Shane van Gisbergen and hometown hero Jimmy Johnson guzzling the last remaining drops of gasoline on the planet in a dazzling display of carmanship—they’ll join my NASCAR pop-up party.

By the time my daughter brings her friends over, we’ll have a real welcoming committee. I’ll set a special lawn chair out for the nice young boy who bought her flowers on her birthday. Have a Dew and talk to me about yourself and please list out your morals alphabetically, kid, I’ll say.

Because, like I said, my daughter tried to steal my car.

She wasn’t going to Mexico. But while Claire and I were off doing businessy stuff to afford the teen’s skincare rituals, she and a friend decided to teach themselves stick shift.  She’s never driven a stick before. I’m not saying she has, but if she has driven a vehicle at all—it would have been done in a remote, abandoned parking lot where the only possible thing she could destroy was the concept of driving itself.

But a couple TikTok videos later, she and her friends felt a certain level of mastery had been achieved, and they gave it a go. They backed our VW Bug out of the garage with a series of stalls and transmission seizures, and managed to get it into the carport, attempting to do “donuts.” That’s when I got a call from a resident, who had taken an active interest in this experiment.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NASCAR (@nascar)

Which got me wondering about the power and might of vehicles. Turns out, even at carport speeds there exists a bit of potential fireworks. A garage door could become not a garage door anymore. At 145 MPH on Naval Base Coronado this weekend (don’t worry, they slow down to 100 MPH for turns), NASCAR drivers are essentially doorbell ditching gods. I didn’t register the temperature after my daughter’s trial run, but the track at NASCAR races usually hits a cool 130-150 degrees, enough to lightly sear some Nikes (the tires themselves hover in the 200 degree range).

And that is at least part of our fascination with NASCAR (the other fascination is the legendary pit parties, which either set humanity back a few evolutionary links, or advance it by the same amount of links). These drivers take something us adults do every day in a very efficient, boring way and take it to its extreme impulse. Grace and precision at the thunderous edge of shit going terribly wrong. Most of us have, upon seeing the price of California gas, wanted to pile our worldly possessions into a Honda Pilot and see how fast we could make it to our new home in Vegas. So NASCAR drivers are acting on our own wildest impulse.

Music drifts across the fairway. Someone’s in flip flops. The Pacific flashes in the distance. Sun peeks onto shoulders through the palm trees. It’s spring, technically, but the air reads suspiciously like summer. At the par-3 course at Liberty Station, the longest hole barely stretches past 120 yards, and no one looks particularly interested in becoming the next PGA legend.

This is where Sunday Golf was born.

“I got dragged to a par-3 course in 2019 —The Loma Club—and it was way more my jam,” says Ronan Galvin, CEO and co-founder of Sunday Golf, a company that makes lightweight golf bags for players who’d rather carry less and laugh more. “It was a lot different than the stereotypical ideas you have about golf where it’s kind of long, uptight, and exclusive.”

Galvin spent over a decade in the golf industry working in product development, sourcing and manufacturing. But he didn’t grow up swinging clubs. Basketball and football were more his speed. What clicked for him was a simpler, more relaxed kind of play: shorter rounds and weekend games built for fun rather than formality. The kind of golf that resonated for him felt accessible, effortless, and surprisingly his lifestyle.

He noticed something else, too.

On a course where five clubs do the job, players were still lugging 14. So Galvin built something smaller. Lighter. A bag designed specifically for par-3 rounds, the Loma Bag is sleek, functional, and refreshingly unfussy. It’s practical minimalism in a sport known for excess.

Sunday Golf was slated to launch in January 2020. Then, COVID hit. Shipments stalled; lost at sea. The future felt shaky. But the series of catastrophes for the young company turned out to be anything but: By the time inventory arrived that August, golf had become one of the few activities people could safely do.

“It introduced and brought so many people back to the game,” Galvin says. “It created a habit for a lot of people, which is a big reason golf is on its growth trajectory.” 

It turns out Americans can’t get enough of golf. Forty-eight million of them swung clubs last year, a 41 percent jump since 2019, and the National Golf Foundation says the total could top 50 million by the end of 2026.

The brand rode this unlikely momentum. Since 2021, Sunday Golf has expanded into larger lightweight bags and continues evolving from there. A major reason for the company’s success is its approachability, a value so central that it’s literally written on the office walls in the form of the company’s guiding mission: “Get 500,000 golfers having more fun by 2027.” This goal is measured, fittingly, by golf bags sold. 

Sunday Golf has already passed 300,000 bags sold.

But the numbers aren’t the point.

“To remind the world that life is meant to be enjoyed,” Galvin says of the brand’s why. In an era dominated by screens, golf offers something analog. “People are outside, touching grass with their friends. A golf bag is a golf bag, but our products are vehicles to help support that.”

Unlike legacy golf giants promising proximity to Rory McIlroy-level greatness, Sunday Golf leans into what Galvin jokingly calls “diet golf” or “golf light”—weekend rounds, driving range sessions, company scrambles. The bags are built for the casual golfer, and the fit feels obvious.

That philosophy resonates across Southern California, where year-round sunshine means golf courses never really hibernate for winter. As Galvin puts it, “the laid-back lifestyle of San Diego kind of seeps into everyone’s veins.”

Sometimes the validation arrives via email: a 76-year-old customer is able to walk the course again because their golf bag is lighter. Parents are able to take their children out with Sunday Golf’s kids line.

For Galvin, that’s the real win. Not perfection. Not prestige. Just more people outside, enjoying themselves. In San Diego, that might be the most natural mission of all.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN DIEGO, CA — [June 15th, 2026] — Art plus story equals culture. Today, three local groups deeply invested in advancing San Diego arts and culture— San Diego FC Playmakers, Art & Design District, and San Diego Magazine—have joined forces to tell its stories.

The initial project will be a landmark September edition of San Diego Magazine—fully dedicated to the people, ideas, and identities of the city’s creative community. After its release, those stories and more will extend across six months of integrated digital, social, and multi-platform coverage. Art & Design District and SDFC Playmakers will serve as co-publishers of the expanded editorial vision.

The Art & Design District is evolving into San Diego’s first home for the performing arts at iconic downtown venues like the Civic Theatre and Jacobs Music Center alongside research and development programs focused on artist live/work spaces, galleries, studios, and New School of Architecture & Design.

“[The Art & Design District initiative] is a long-term investment in San Diego’s creative life and the creative workforce that powers our cultural experiences and creative industries here at home and across the world,” says Jonathan Glus, Prebys Senior Fellow for Art & Design in Residence at Downtown San Diego Partnership. “But infrastructure alone is not enough. The public needs to see, understand, and participate in what’s being built and why. Joining as co-publisher of this issue means helping ensure that the story of San Diego’s creative community—its artists, its institutions, its future—gets told at the level of ambition the moment requires.”

San Diego has entered a defining chapter in how the region invests in its creative community, with civic and philanthropic leaders working alongside artists, brands, institutions, and people to chart a new model of public-private support for arts and culture.

As digital co-publishers of San Diego Magazine‘s arts and culture coverage, SDFC’s Playmakers partnership will include a six-month integrated collaboration designed to sustain the visibility of San Diego’s creative community well beyond a single issue.

“The Playmakers program was built on the belief that the creative community is essential to what makes San Diego, San Diego,” says Sebastian, San Diego FC’s SVP of Brand and Innovation. “Investing in local media that tells those stories—and reaches the audiences who need to hear them—is one of the most direct ways we can support the artists, organizations, and cultural leaders shaping this city’s future. We’re proud to step in as digital co-publishers of San Diego Magazine‘s arts and culture coverage and the founding partner of this new editorial program.”

Under the partnerships:

• The Art & Design District joins as Co-Publisher of the September 2026 Arts & Culture Issue, undwriting San Diego Magazine‘s most ambitious editorial event of the year. 
• SDFC Playmakers joins as Digital Co-Publisher of San Diego Magazine‘s arts and culture coverage, founding a six-month integrated partnership that includes co-publisher presence in the September issue. 

The partnership represents a new model for regional media: civic and cultural institutions providing the resources required for sustained, ambitious, local editorial media focused on the neighborhoods it serves. 

“For 78 years, the magazine has told the story of arts and culture here,” says Claire Johnson, CEO of San Diego Magazine. “But the fragmentation of traditional media has made it harder than ever to cover this community at the depth and scale it deserves. SDFC Playmakers and the Art & Design District have recognized something critical: Media is not separate from the civic conversation, it’s the stage for the conversation.”

San Diego Magazine retains full editorial control over all reporting, features, and original content produced under both partnerships.

“Our role in this ecosystem is to tell the story of San Diego’s culture and provide context for our readers.” says Johnson. “These partnerships give us the resources to do justice to that responsibility—and to extend that commitment well beyond a single issue. Our readers also deserve to know exactly how this work was funded. I’m grateful to our partners, and to the arts and culture community in San Diego for letting us tell this story.”

The September Arts & Culture Issue will be released early September 2026, with digital, social, video, and podcast coverage rolling out through early 2027.

---

ABOUT SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE For 78 years, San Diego Magazine has been the region’s leading lifestyle and culture publication, reaching approximately 6 million readers monthly across print, digital, newsletter, and social platforms. Owned and operated locally, the magazine has been the connective tissue of San Diego’s cultural conversation since 1948.

ABOUT SDFC PLAYMAKERS The Playmakers program is an ongoing initiative that seeks to identify and showcase the talent of San Diego creatives who are contributing to the culture, substance, and flow of our community. We want to bring the San Diego community together by marrying football and creativity to provide a platform for these Playmakers who are positively impacting our culture by pushing the boundaries through innovative ideas. The goal is to create a program that consistently provides growth and exposure opportunities for San Diego creatives, while shaping an authentic direction for San Diego FC’s brand and community-building process. Through this program we hope to contribute to the creative fabric of our city by providing paid jobs, projects, collaborations, as well as networking opportunities for Playmakers.

ABOUT THE ART & DESIGN DISTRICT The Art & Design District is a Downtown San Diego Partnership initiative, supported by the Prebys Foundation, working to shape a connected, vibrant arts and design district in downtown San Diego. Led by Art and Culture Expert Fellow Jonathan Glus, the initiative convenes artists, cultural leaders, civic stakeholders, and residents in service of a downtown that reflects the creativity, identity, and diversity of the region. Learn more at downtownsandiego.org.