According to the Lego Movie, everything is awesome. And if we’re being honest, everything in the movie is awesome, from the plot to the cast to the top-notch song by my favorite band, Tegan & Sara. But can everything be awesome in real life? Now hold your horses, I know that the second movie reverses the first movie’s stance on awesomeness and actually claims that not everything is awesome. Still, it’s worth stopping for a second to think about what it would even mean for everything to be awesome and if that’s a real possibility. Because (surprise surprise) the issue of universal awesomeness is a real philosophical debate and there are some pretty big names on both sides.

Before we can really figure out which side of the debate we want to stand on, we have to think about what it would even mean for everything to be awesome. You could think that it just means that bad things never happen, that Unikitty gets her dream and the world is just one endless party. But if we turn to the sagely wisdom of Lonely Planet (who provide the rap in the movie’s awesome song), we see that they don’t really go that route. They say that “it’s awesome to win and it’s awesome to lose.” Traditionally, losing is a not-awesome thing. So how could losing be awesome?

One way to explain this is to think about how losing is a learning opportunity, a challenge to be overcome, you know, that kind of thing. Essentially, you say that losing is good because it will help you win next time. But hold on just a second. If losing is only good because it helps you win, is losing actually awesome? It feels like winning is the actual awesome thing and losing is just a kind of tool to help you get to winning. In fancy philosophy terms, this kind of explanation gives losing a merely extrinsic value, while winning has intrinsic value. Losing is awesome because it helps you do something else, winning is just awesome all on its own.

In my opinion, this is the wrong way (or at least the less interesting way) to think about the awesomeness of losing. If losing is awesome, it should be because losing itself is awesome. We don’t have to explain why losing is awesome any more than we have to explain why winning is awesome. But now we’ve gone into some pretty radical territory. Is it really awesome to lose? It certainly doesn’t feel awesome. But maybe not feeling awesome is awesome too?! If we push this it turns out that being sad is just as awesome as being happy, love and family are no more awesome than sickness and death… yeah it’s some pretty wild stuff. 

To return to the fancy words from before, here we’re saying that everything, literally everything, has intrinsic value. What’s more, they all have the same amount of intrinsic value because they are all, well, awesome. Valuing one thing over another is, according to this view, just an ignorant thing to do. After all, everything is awesome, so you can’t go wrong no matter what you do. Can’t decide which flavor of ice cream to get? Don’t worry, they’re all awesome! 

Yet every day people spend countless hours deciding between their equally awesome options, they use meaningless words like ‘better’ and ‘worse,’ they stress themselves out and try to be their best selves – all for nothing. 

This is the bleak reality of an ‘everything is awesome’ world. When everything has intrinsic value, distinctions in value no longer make sense. Life itself becomes, arguably, meaningless. If the life of a murderer, of an Einstein, of a lowly serf, are all equally awesome, what’s the point in trying to do anything at all?

Yet this viewpoint is put forth by a lot of famous philosophers. Zen Buddhism for example, makes avoiding distinctions of value one of its core goals, and indeed Buddhist enlightenment could be understood simply as experiencing that ‘everything is awesome’ all the time. Hegel argues that the whole world is the manifestation of Reason; every part of it is rational and, in that sense at least, is awesome. Spinoza claims that the cosmos is all just God in different forms, and since God is awesome, everything in the world must be awesome too. 

Alright so now that we have an idea of what it would mean for everything to be awesome, we can start thinking about whether this perspective accurately captures the reality of the world. But I’m going to warn you right from the start that there is no way to prove this view false on its own terms. To see why, notice that the terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ mean basically the same thing as the words ‘awesome’ and ‘not-awesome’, just in the context of logic and reasoning. In other words, by labeling some statements as true and others as false you are distinguishing between good and bad things to believe. You are, then, already buying into the idea that some things, namely false things, are not awesome. So then if you were to take this value-laden dualistic perspective and use its premises to prove that the world actually is value-laden and dualistic… well you can see how that wouldn’t really be very convincing to anyone who didn’t already agree. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that awesome-ism (a totally real philosophical position, by the way), is true. There are plenty of internally consistent theories of the world that can’t be disproven, and all we’ve done here is added one more to the list. So instead of asking whether awesome-ism is true, perhaps we’d do better to ask ourselves whether this way of thinking about the world is useful or helpful. When we think of the world as this eternally perfect thing where even suffering is awesome, how does that make us feel and how does it make us act?

This is really more of a personal question than a philosophical one, so I encourage you to do some introspection on it. A lot of people find the awesome-ist viewpoint incredibly frustrating. It deprives all their actions of motivation and makes life ultimately kind of pointless. On top of that it makes conversations with their fellow human beings about what to do and how to achieve those goals almost impossible since, after all, every perspective is equally valid and good so what’s the point of even talking about them? Every discussion is just a foregone conclusion – yes, it’s awesome, I get it, now please just shut up. To these people awesome-ism is a naïve and, to be honest, somewhat privileged position that just ignores the very real problems and suffering that people go through every day.

On the other hand, seeing the world through this lens is also very soothing and encouraging. In this sense, the awesome-ist perspective serves as a refuge from the violent storm of good and evil that always seems to be tossing our daily lives around. It’s no accident that virtually all religions ascribe to some version of this perspective, whether it’s the claim that all things have Buddha-nature or the idea that everything is part of God’s awesome plan. Thinking of the world as totally awesome also encourages us to find awesomeness in the mundane. Think of those Dutch still life paintings – who cares about a painting of some fruit? Well, what those Dutch masters are showing us is that even just some fruit on a table can be beautiful because, at its core, everything is awesome.

Of course, neither of these views is true or false, accurate or inaccurate. Ultimately they’re just different ways of seeing the world, and we can acknowledge and use them each when the time is right. When you’re having an argument with your loved ones, maybe that’s a good time to just shrug and say everything is awesome. But when you encounter people actively harming the weak and marginalized, maybe that’s a time to respond assertively to what is clearly un-awesome behavior. 

For my part, I like to think of these as layers of experience. In most of our daily lives, we live in a world where some things are good and others are not. We spend all our time chasing the good and avoiding the bad, while encouraging others to do the same. But this can get tiring and frustrating. And in those times it’s comforting to think that under all that back and forth, at its core the universe and everything in it is fundamentally awesome. In a way, I wish everyone could experience the world that way all the time, but we have to do a lot of navigating good and evil before we can get there. That’s ok though. After all, the journey towards awesomeness is itself just one more awesome part of the totally awesome world we live in.