Thanksgiving is the Super Bowl of awkwardness.

You love these people (mostly), but the scripts are fuzzy. Do we hug? Do we talk politics? What do I say when someone hits me with the third “so, how’s work?” in an hour?

We tend to treat that discomfort as a “me” problem, like we’re bad at socializing or broken in some way.

Alexandra Plakias thinks that’s the wrong story. She’s a philosopher at Hamilton College and the author of Awkwardness: A Theory, and she argues that there are no awkward people, only awkward situations. Awkwardness, for her, is what happens when the unwritten scripts that guide our social life break down and we are suddenly improvising without a map.

I invited Plakias onto The Gray Area to talk about why awkwardness deserves philosophical attention and what it might look like to change our relationship to those cringey moments. The conversation was taped in 2024, but it seemed relevant as we all prepare to plunge into those delightful holiday conversations with friends and family.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you define awkwardness?

Let me start with what I think it isn’t. Awkwardness is not a personality trait. I don’t think there are “awkward people” in some deep way. When I was writing the book, people constantly said, “I am so awkward,” or “I cannot wait to read this; I am a very awkward person.” It’s a label people reach for very quickly.

In my view, awkwardness is a property of situations, not individuals. It happens when we don’t have the social resources we need to navigate an interaction. We don’t know which norms........

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