Why you sHOULDN’T have a bucket list

      Do you have a bucket list? Are there specific places you wanna go, specific things you wanna do, before … well, you know?

      The term itself is actually fairly recent, with Merriam-Webster finding the first known use only in 2006. Since then, the term has been popularized by the 2007 movie The Bucket List, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two terminally ill men who decide to list things they want to do before they die.

      It’s also been popularized, I think, by the growing number of people in our age group, folks in our sixties, seventies and eighties, who are thinking more and more about how much time they have left and what they haven’t already done before they kick the bucket.

      Kicking the bucket, however, might be an unfortunate term to adopt. The Oxford English Dictionary says the common theory that it refers to hanging is probably not true. Instead, the probable origin relates to the alternative definition of a bucket as a beam used to hang or carry things on. In this case, it may refer to the beam on which slaughtered pigs are suspended. The animals may struggle on the bucket, hence the expression.

      So, excuse me, but I don’t like to think of the last decades of my life like I’m a suspended pig about to be slaughtered.

      Still, I understand the attraction of bucket lists, at least for a certain middle-class demographic. When we’re younger and in relatively better health, it is often hard to summon up the time, the finances or the urgency to see or do something—until, maybe, it is too late to see or do it.

      When we get older, now we have the time, maybe the finances and definitely the urgency. But the idea of trying to cross out specific line items in a few months or even years feels, to me, unnecessarily burdensome.

      Bucket lists create unrealistic expectations, for our lives and our travel, giving priority to new experiences over the familiar ones that bring us joy. They make the new seem like obligations we have to tick off rather than stuff we choose to do.

      It’s a sort of living by-the-numbers life, crossing off places seen or experiences had, rather than being immersed in them or immersed in the rest of our lives. The bucket list can keep us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with the everyday. When we view life as lived only through checking off accomplishments, we are implicitly suggesting that normal life is somehow not good enough.

      Of course, it’s hard to find and maintain satisfaction in daily life. It’s much easier to book a trip and put the burden of entertainment and fulfillment, at least for a time, on another place, culture or experience. Daily life is work—employment, child-rearing, the minutiae of handling difficult thoughts and emotions. By building a bucket list we side-step the process of improving daily life for the short-lived satisfaction of marking off another achievement.

      Living under the directive of a bucket list also inhibits our ability to be spontaneous. Without a bucket list, we can decide, ok, let’s just follow our instincts—let’s go here, not there; let’s do this, not that.

      Finally, it’s tough having a list of things you "must" do before you die because, let’s be frank, you probably won't be able to tick most of them off anyway (whether due to financial, health, social or other circumstances), and obsessing over them may only make us more dissatisfied.  

      Over the last five years, my wife and I had two sort of “bucket list” trips that we didn’t think of as bucket-list trips but more as trips we simply wanted to do. They were ultimately trips that didn’t happen.

      To celebrate our 50th anniversary, we were supposed to go to southern Africa, to Zimbabwe and most of all, Botswana, for a kind of safari. We wanted to go, I think, because both of us have enormously enjoyed the “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” mysteries, set in Botswana. Maybe dumb reason, but so what?

      We were scheduled to leave in September 2020. Remember September 2020, the height of Covid? We didn’t go. We didn’t go anywhere.

      In the spring of 2023, we were scheduled to go to Peru, to the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. We wanted to go because it sounded extraordinary. Then civil unrest broke out, tourists were being helicoptered out of the Sacred Valley, and we rescheduled for this spring.

      Then I had a heart attack and was advised to get nowhere near high elevations. We didn’t go.

      By the way, in both cases, we ended up going to Greece instead, where we had been before, and so it wasn’t on any bucket list. And you know what? Both trips were great and we didn’t think of Botswana or Machu Picchu even once.