Pumped up Kicks

The Retune Blog - 14th July 2023

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

Do you ever really love a song just because of its energy and baseline? You sing along to the lyrics  you’re familiar with, and then one day you stop and read the lyrics and are blown away. That’s precisely what happened to me with this upbeat sounding favourite of mine, Foster the People’s Pumped Up KIcks. Sounding really poppy, energised and upbeat whilst I heard the following, I never really put it all together:

He found a six-shooter gun … But he's coming for you, yeah, he's coming for you. All the other kids with the pumped up kicks, you better run, better run …

So, I guess it’s been obvious to everyone else all along, it’s a song commentating on the mental state of many young people in America and how, with access to guns, this can lead to mass school shootings.

Perhaps this seems a strange way to start a blog which is about living life well, but I think that to get to such a stage of frustration and desperation as to plan to shoot others, there must be a real sense of anger and loss. An existential crisis.

This idea of existential crisis is something I’ve been thinking about this week as I’ve been asked to give a sermon on enduring meaning this weekend. Researching how people explore meaning in life has revealed some fascinating ideas.

For example, Stephen Hawking said; “Work gives you meaning and purpose, life is empty without it.” Thinking about this I really felt this was quite shallow. It could help understand how someone might get to the stage of feeling their life was worthless if they didn’t perceive themselves as succeeding in a career. But, a career doesn’t make everything OK, and not having a career doesn’t make everything not OK. It’s a really individualised, expectation and experience driven perspective.

I won’t go into the other quotes and ideas due to lack of space, but it was clear there was a futility in trying to make the meaning of life a simple statement. Instead, the concept of meaning is something that is far more individually experienced and considered. Whilst there are some common frameworks which help us to frame it for ourselves, such as how we see ourselves (identity), what’s important to us (values), and how we see ourselves in relationship to others (community),

And perhaps here’s how we engage meaning in learning to live life well as both a protective measure against tradedgies like mass shootings, and an inspirational measure to live well. It’s something we consider in the Life Garage in terms of an ancient monastic tool called the rule for life, which helps to find a more personal reason to be.