The Shins are a brilliant band. Their songs are as melodically moving as they are lyrically complex. Every time I hear their music, I am reminded afresh why I am drawn to them. Yet, one day, not too long ago, I was listening to a song of theirs that I had never heard before. It was called “Those to Come” (The Shins, 2003), and what surprised me the most was how quickly I delved into depression the moment the song began. I felt like my soul was being robbed of something far more important than anything else: my soul. The end of the song summed up my depressed emotive state in the words “Kill, propagate, only to die.”
As I reflected on that statement, I began to wonder how the vast majority of our semi- educated society could be duped into believing an Ideology that is so depressing. To believe that our only purpose on earth is to drive foreword the cycle of life is no better than saying that my life is meaningless, or there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe. In all of our lives, no matter how inane, we struggle to find meaning. Doesn’t it just make sense that what follows from that want of meaning that there is something to be the object of that meaning? Doesn’t it follow that the search for meaning within us has an objective place outside ourselves? As a great philosopher of our time once put it, “"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" (Kierkegaard, 2006)