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?”

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

The Future

We’ve been here before.

In 2012, city funding for the arts and culture in San Diego had eroded. As a corrective, the city council unanimously approved “Penny for the Arts”—a promise to dedicate roughly one penny of every dollar spent on hotel rooms (the Transient Occupancy Tax, or TOT).

The logic was fair and sound: Cultural institutions and events help attract visitors. Those visitors pay hotel taxes. So, the people agreed, some of that hotel-tax revenue should go back into maintaining the cultural ecosystem that helps bring those visitors and that money.

Projected as a five-year plan, the measure was supposed to increase funding to $17.9 million by 2017.

It never did. The penny was never guaranteed, so each year the city used part of it for other priorities. By 2023, the money going to arts and culture was up to about a half a penny. Even as TOT revenue has gone up significantly.

In 2019, TOT revenue was $245 million.

In 2025: $325 million.

One fix would be to guarantee the penny. Not simple, given San Diego’s financial woes. But the alternative—eroding the culture that makes San Diego San Diego, give it its identity—also doesn’t feel wise. Plus, even a locked percentage still rises and falls with tourism, which is why culture advocates want a guaranteed floor on top of it.

Another solution would be to give the arts commission actual authority.

“It’s an advisory body,” says arts commissioner Kamaal Martin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who takes our advice.”

He described the commissioners debating real, consequential questions this year, like whether and how to divide the cuts between funding pools. But those conversations “don’t connect to whoever’s actually deciding,” Martin says. “We haven’t been entrusted with decision-making about relevant things nearly enough.”

Christine Martinez is building political infrastructure through her organization Arts+Culture:San Diego—which is starting a 501(c)(4) lobbying structure not unlike police and fire unions. Martinez is also keeping her community actively engaged. “We won’t be caught off guard next year like we were this year,” she tells me.

Then there’s the evergreen issue of affordability and accessibility. Kiplinger’s most recent report ranks San Diego as the 11th most expensive city in the US, based on cost of living. The average home value is $980,700 (the US median is $540,000), but San Diego’s median household income is only one-third greater than the national level. Rent is also 66 percent higher than the national average ($2,716 vs. $1,636).

This is why San Diego has long suffered from the creative brain drain—creatives leaving for more affordable cities. “Artists are free to live wherever they want, and they will go where the rent is affordable,” says Jennifer de Poyen of Space 4 Art. “When they leave, they take their gifts with them, and their contributions, and their economic impact.”

One saving grace is the presence of Tijuana, where the cost of living is about 60 percent lower than San Diego, per Numbeo. Tijuana has long functioned as an affordable neighborhood for many in San Diego’s creative culture. It’s part of the reason why the binational identity is such a constant in our galleries, music, theater, murals, and culture. While that cross-border blood flow is one of San Diego’s most compelling attributes, few artists living that life would call it convenient or easy. A city is at a disadvantage when its culture creators have to cross a border to go home at night, and cross again the next morning to work.

In May, San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a $2.75 million arts initiative of its own. It includes an Artist Space Grant Program aimed directly at the affordability crisis, as well as an artist-in-residence program, a dedicated Binational Creative Economy Investment, and a one-time investment in the Black Arts and Culture District in Encanto.

Bob Lehman of San Diego Art Matters has been doing county-level, binational organizing for years; in 2023, he helped get the county’s arts commission reestablished after 30 years of defunctness. That’s important because it gives arts and culture an official seat in county government, advising the County Board of Supervisors on arts and culture policy. He also brought in consultant Laura Zucker, who ran LA County’s arts program for three decades, to build a real regional plan.

“I really believe we’ll have something set up here that other communities come and look at,” he told me. “A national template other cities come to learn from.”

When asked who decides which artists will get the new grant money, county arts commissioner and executive director of the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center Monica Delgadillo Hernandez doesn’t hedge.

“That’s part of the infrastructure we’re going to be building,” she says. “What should a panel of reviewers look like? Should it be the commissioners? Should it be other folks? A supervisor?” She was just as candid that the commission itself doesn’t reflect San Diego’s population—Chicano communities are roughly a third of the city, she tells me, “and that’s not represented at the table yet.”

What Other Cities Prove Is Possible

The great news is that none of these solutions have to be invented from scratch. Numerous cities serve as examples of what’s possible—if we have the will.

Jonathon Glus—Prebys Foundation Senior Fellow for Art & Design, the Executive Director of the Art + Design District, and board president for California for the Arts—worked in Houston before coming to San Diego. The Texas city dedicates 74.5 percent of its hotel tax to arts grants by formula, and that support is guaranteed. Washington, DC locked in dedicated arts funding in 2019. Salt Lake City, my hometown, has run a voter-approved arts tax for almost 30 years, most recently reauthorized through 2034. And just this summer, New York City pushed cultural funding to a record $323.8 million, even incorporating an emergency fund.

Denver’s model is interesting because instead of a city-dependent funding model, theirs is a 0.1 percent regional sales tax. In place since 1988 and renewed by voters three times, their Scientific & Cultural Facilities District has distributed between $54 million and $85 million to arts, culture, and scientific orgs—each of the last 12 years.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

None of these cities got there by accident. They decided, on purpose, that arts and culture were worth protecting from politics—and, in some cases, worth building an entire identity around.

“That’s how Miami has flipped the switch,” says Glus. “People go to Miami for culture as much as they do the beach.”

San Diego has spent decades selling itself backward: Beach and weather first, culture as an afterthought you might stumble into. Glus would love to see the strategy flipped: Visitors should come for the art, “and then, by the way, you’re on the beach.”

So What Happens From Here?

“I do think it was a wake-up call for the community,” de Poyen says of the budget fight. “People understand that our funding is vulnerable. It was a lesson in how much power people have when they coalesce. But wow, is it painful.”

Glus says he’s genuinely optimistic. “The players have all changed seats, but the work is moving forward.”

“I believe optimism is a moral duty,” says Martin, who’s both power-fist and polite.

In eight months, there will be another budget fight. Everyone I talked to expects it will be worse. But something happened this spring that can’t be undone.

“I hope this rupture has brought us together in a moment of self-realization,” says Leticia Gomez Franco of the Balboa Art Conservation Center. “I hope we stop being so transactional; we begin to see ourselves and each other as partners in this work.”

That’s the whole ask, really. And it’s on all of us.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.

Without concrete, wildflowers are just weeds. Any honest history of San Diego art and culture is tension and its reckonings. It begins before the name existed, with the Kumeyaay. It must pass through the Panama-California Exposition, one hell of a county fair that conjured Balboa Park as our grand cultural stage. It pays tribute to the lights of La Jolla, where the donor pool helped realize unrealizable things. It should mention names like Marston, Scripps, Ochoa, DeWitt, Lopez, Klauber, Baldessari, Torres… so many.

In short spaces like this, long histories like that become roll calls. So this is more of a walk through pressure points, notes on recurring forces and regional oddities.

Border life is key to understanding the here of here. Art without dialogue is just decoration. At its best, that dialogue should be a tad muddy, emotionally gassed. In other words, it should be in need of art—to widen perspective, parse meaning, see the unseen.

San Diego’s central dialogue—the magic and the stressor—is being flatmates with Mexico’s second-largest city by population. That makes San Diego a swing-gate of shared and vastly different perspectives, both its own place and something larger. And in no other major city in the US do the fresh flow of ideas from two countries—different governments, laws, mores, expressions, arts, cultures, traditions, economies, loves, and resentments—mingle at such a constant daily rate (due respect to El Paso).

That binational steam created Chicano Park, one of the most uniquely San Diegan contributions to national and international culture. When construction of the I-5 and Coronado Bridge divided Logan Heights, neighbors protested by transmuting prejudicial concrete into redwoods of Chicano art. Turning a civic wound into a beautiful and enduring landmark that expressed and preserved a core identity—like East Side Gallery in Berlin or Constitution Hill in Johannesburg—is damn near the core of what art is supposed to do.

Like any city, the underground-overground friction is crucial in San Diego. Our culture is headlined by institutions that lift creative work onto national and international stages: MCASD, The Nat, SDMA, Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Symphony, WorldBeat Center, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, Mingei, Museum of Us, Stuart Collection, Timken, ICA, Comic-Con, etc. The next mutations grow in the seams: street murals, music dives, tattoo shops, wheatpasted walls, graffiti, lowriders, surf and skate art (though in San Diego, this is mainstream), pop-up shows, backyard shows, beach raves, any place with room for people and a loose relationship with regulations.

Both art and culture get their power from power. They’re fundamentally a conversation with and retort against dominant structures. San Diego’s most pervasive structure is arguably the most rigid form: the military. Its presence is heavy in the southern tip (Border Patrol), the middle (Navy and MCAS Miramar), and northern edge (Camp Pendleton). The military is San Diego’s largest employer, by a long shot.

Within this plus-sized environment of order and hierarchy, it’s understandable that Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY” posters in the late ’90s struck such a potent chord. The most compelling punk rock is often outside a strong governor’s window. (The “OBEY” series featured an ominous, propaganda-style André the Giant wheatpasted on random ugly surfaces across San Diego—launching Fairey’s style that he eventually used for Obama’s “HOPE” poster.)

Armed forces are often viewed as the absence of creative culture—understandably so, since rogue individual expression feels like a pretty sure way to sink a war effort.

But in San Diego, the Navy’s unsuspecting role as art creator—directly or indirectly—is hard to ignore. Tattoos are a dawn-of-time practice of many early cultures, including the Kumeyaay. But Polynesia was a core realm. Sailors were exposed to it on deployment in the Pacific Rim, inking their arms with the names of loved ones and unit insignia. Back in San Diego, they’d flaunt those tats in the beaches and bars of Mission Beach or PB (Marines did the same in Oceanside.) Enlistees were the muscular flesh galleries that helped turn skin art into one of the city’s most widespread modern art forms.

During WWII, the military also trained huge legions of San Diego laborers how to build war machines. Those mechanics, engineers, machinists, welders, painters, and metal fabricators used those skills for creative good in their neighborhoods—especially in custom car culture, which took off in the post-war ’50s and ’60s. Mexican-American vets helped develop the lowrider scene, a deeply rooted part of San Diego creative expression. Galleries on slow-moving wheels.

Tourism is the other mainstream force ripe for creating against. It is both critical to San Diego’s economy, and one of the greatest barriers to deeper, more nuanced expressions of what and who San Diego is. The industry of selling our city to passers-through creates a gigantic tarp of cultural tropes. It reinforces the most obvious charms—cute zoo animal takes in an epic sunset with a giant margarita—and doesn’t yield much airspace to the thrilling micro-cultures that live and breathe where locals live and breathe. Nothing against watercolors of dolphins, but much against the hegemony of watercolors of dolphins.

Maybe because of these dominant forces, San Diegans especially tend to force underground and institutional art into a needless cage match. It’s human instinct to champion the underdog as more worthy, but that has always felt like a form of articide.

It’s like saying the only good food is made by gritty upstarts who crafted their own whisks from discarded shopping carts. Most of those plucky whisk-makers would love to eventually be paid properly, would love a stage, a grant, a building, a donor, a lighting rig, health insurance, maybe even one chair that doesn’t threaten the spine.

That’s what the major institutions do. Both stages—the duct-taped and the donored—serve vital roles and deserve commensurate support if we care about the entire lifespan of creative expression and not just its first exciting steps. Championing the starving artist exclusively just secures an enduring poverty for the creative class at large.

I’ve often theorized it’s harder to create great art and culture in cities like San Diego, where the climate is supernaturally pleasant. In colder/hotter/rainier/less beautiful cities, people are forced indoors to fabricate their own beauty (the grunge music of Seattle, the obscene creative output of Reykjavík). San Diego’s eternally mild sunshine tends to make the human body our art medium of choice. But scratch the surface of that surf poster (and I’ve only scratched a miniscule percent here), and this city’s far from the cultural shallows it gets accused of being.

Addendum: A Personal Agenda. In scouting the route of art and culture across San Diego county through history, two areas come up again and again: La Jolla and Barrio Logan. So I propose a collaboration between two icons of artful concrete—Chicano Park and Salk Institute (one of the world’s great examples of brutalism architecture). Let Barrio Logan’s muralists go nuts on that coastal science fortress, unite the realms for a moment in time.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act I. See Act II and Act III here.

Every spring, Christine Martinez reaches out to the arts community to explain what’s on the line, hoping they’ll engage with the city’s budget process. Cultural funding, she constantly reminds, is almost always strapped to the guillotine. Especially in a city strapped for cash.

“It’s not an easy ask,” says Martinez, manager of Arts+Culture:San Diego. “Showing up is a real cost for small, volunteer-run groups that can’t spare half a day at City Council without possibly having to close their doors.”

Then, last April—with one day’s notice to arts leaders—Mayor Todd Gloria proposed a budget that didn’t trim arts funding; it eviscerated it, from $13.8 million to $2 million. An 85 percent slash. Other city departments faced cuts of about 7 percent.

The scheduled date of the cuts was just three months away (beginning of the fiscal year). Organizational leaders have to plan months if not years ahead to run their organizations. They had made hires, dedicated spending, and programmed their seasons based on a reasonable expectation that support for the arts would be somewhat in line with previous years. (The City has allotted at least $7 million a year to arts every year for the last 20 years, and the last four years have ranged between $13.8 and $18.2 million.)

The day felt even more existential given the national and international climate around the arts: namely, the federal government’s repeated proposal to eliminate the country’s two biggest cultural foundations (NEA and NEH), and the global trend of AI replacing more costly human creatives.

“It shocked everybody,” says Kamaal Martin, arts commissioner and co-founder of Art Power Equity. “If the message had been, ‘Times are tough, everybody tighten their belts a little,’ it would have landed differently. But there was no vision offered for the future, no parity in the cut. It was just, essentially, ‘Fuck you.’”

Among things I’m good at—sleeping late, low bidding for expensive shoes on Poshmark, parallel parking on either side of the street—budget analysis isn’t among them. In trying to understand how bad the finances were for San Diego to propose this drastic cut, I found myself drowning in numbers, pie charts, and politi-speak.

In his April 27 newsletter, Gloria explained that balancing the budget means “asking hard questions about every single dollar this city spends: Is this a core responsibility of city government, or is it something we do when we can afford to?”

Fair enough—if he were to ask those hard questions about every single dollar this city spends. It also makes his conclusion clear: The City of San Diego does not view supporting arts and culture as a core responsibility.

Which begs more than a few questions: Should the City be responsible? If not, then who? How crucial are arts and culture to a city? And since this is a budget discussion, how much revenue does the arts and culture industry generate for San Diego? What’s the ROI?

The Impact of Arts & Culture

$1.2 billion.

That’s how much economic activity San Diego’s arts and culture nonprofits generated in 2022, according to the City’s latest Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 report. The industry created nearly 17,000 jobs and generated $878 million of personal income for local residents. About 15 percent of the people showing up to arts events in San Diego are tourists, so money was raised through TOT (Transit Occupancy Tax). The activity generated $275.7 million in tax revenue to the city.

In other words, the ROI seems to be ROI-ing.

Still, there have been signs that cuts were coming. In 2025, the City demoted the Department of Cultural Affairs to a division, folding it into the Economic Development Department (EDD). That meant Cultural Affairs no longer had independence, nor its own leader sitting at the same organizational level as departments like parks and recreation, library, police, and fire. It lost institutional leverage and would now have to compete with other EDD priorities—real estate, airport operations, business development, etc.—for budget allocation.

To be clear, few arts administrators and leaders I spoke with are interested in the either/or false choice of funding law enforcement or after-school programs; the fire departments or libraries. They’re sincere in looking for solutions that don’t leave any single group with a greater burden of righting a long-out-of-balance budget.

Jennifer de Poyen, executive director of Space 4 Art, says Gloria had long been a supporter of the arts, which made his attempted Red Wedding especially upsetting.