Bucket lists – what is the point?
A few Pimms at the HK Rugby Sevens on Saturday and I’m chatting about bucket lists and holidays with a very well travelled friend. As it turns out, neither of us have our lists written down and the mental list grows faster than things are completed.
In my case, the list grows based on what I’ve seen, heard and read, mainly from friends and some of my own research.
Now I’m questioning the purpose of this never shrinking, continually expanding list.
Do people really use it as a list of all the things they are going to do before they die? Or is it:
- something to brag about
- aspirational
- things I’d really like to do and may not necessarily have the opportunity (including time constraints)
- useful guide to planning holidays
- some of the above
- other?
While it’s no secret that I like to complete things, it seems wrong to think of a bucket list as a check / tick box exercise. That’s the same as going somewhere just to say I’ve been. What do I do when I get there if the goal was the location?
While I’m aware that people do travel this way, it’s not the reason I like to travel, otherwise, I’d travel a lot more frequently and stay in places for a lot less time so I can fit go to more places. This is not for me. I would miss the fun of the journey, meeting people, the food, the art, the nature / the buildings (depending where I am), the experience of massacring another language and the feel of the place itself since these are the main reasons I like to travel. There’s probably others too but I’m still too tired from the Sevens to think of those right now!
For this reason, it’s not useful for me to have a destination as an item on a bucket list. That’s more of a separate list for “Places I’d Like to Go”. The bucket list could feed into this one and it could be referred to when planning holidays.
While I think it’s fun to have some aspirational experiences written, it seems disheartening to document things that I would like to do but know that it is incredibly unlikely that I ever would. Whether those reasons are financial or that the necessary means of travel hasn’t been invented yet or that realistically, living until 104 still won’t give me enough time to fit everything in. The time restriction does highlight the need to prioritise the list.
It seems more productive to have experiences on a bucket list. It could be a particular experience in a particular location. It could be multiple experiences in the one location. It could just be an experience that can be completed in any location.
This leads neatly into the next part. What’s the point of having a list of things if there’s no plan to achieve them? It’s just a list full of fun things I’d like to do.
This is why I probably haven’t written my list. It would mean I’d need a plan.
The plan for each item would follow the usual SMART criteria (it’s useful for more than objective setting at work) and then I’d need to make sure I’m making a conscious effort on each of them. At the very least, each experience would have a due date so I can stagger the actionable parts. Remembering of course, that ageing is going to make some of the more active ideas a little trickier so I should prioritise those ahead of a few other things (I’m thinking of sledding in Norway to see the Northern Lights as an example).
As I’m making progress against each item, it would ultimately lead to having each experience on my bucket list. Now that sounds a lot more exciting than only having a country to set foot in. As an example, my recent trip to Paris has been on my list since before I knew about bucket lists. I knew I wanted to go to the Louvre, climb the Eiffel Tower, see Notre Dame and spend some time writing in cafes in St Germaine, absorbing literary genius (while I may not have absorbed to be able to implement, it was felt!). Under my new bucket list model, this would be four different items that happen to have a location in common. The location can go on my “Places I’d Like to Go” list which I can refer to whenever I’m making holiday plans.
Now, I’m excited about writing my list.
* Thanks to Tritonal featuring Phoebe Ryan for the title to this post. As with most of my other posts, the song itself has nothing to do with the content, the title is really the only link.