Living in A Post-Bucket-List Era
Why do we create bucket lists? It’s interesting how we jot down and continuously add to that bulleted list filled with things so seemingly impossible—so beyond reach—that we feel the need to name and categorize them as such: I hypothesize that this is inherently an act of goal-setting, whether it occurs consciously or subconsciously, often allowing us to map out the process by which we might go about achieving said goal. Why else would we partake in this mental exercise, if we actually believed that the things we included in our lists were, indeed, truly unattainable for us? The latter notion would just make this a sad, sad, borderline masochistic practice.
My question, then, is this: doesn’t the mere act of identifying an item supposedly meant for a bucket list bring us closer to that goal, in one way or another, no matter how seemingly vast the physical, social, and/or psychological gap is between us in the present moment and the us that has, then, achieved that goal?
Let me explain.
I did some digital cleansing the other day, an action that might be deemed worthy of praise by TED-Talk-giving, Medium-blog-running, Marie-Kondo-Cal-Newport-type apologists. In doing so, I stumbled upon a whopping four-item bucket list that I had hazily, yet ever so enthusiastically, typed into my Notes app back in 2017:
“1. visit Paris
2. get into college
3. visit the Maldives
4. go skydiving”
To my pleasant surprise, it turns out I’d actually accomplished two out of the four list items. I visited Paris less than a year after I added it to my bucket list, and I not only got into college, but I had also graduated by the time this list resurfaced in my life. Statistically, a 50% success rate doesn’t sound too shabby when you conveniently ignore the fact that there were only four items to begin with. Let’s not focus on that, though.
I know what you’re probably thinking: visiting Paris and getting into college seem more commonplace, at least in the grand scheme of things, than visiting the Maldives or going skydiving might seem. But that’s exactly my point: this assortment of goals that could vary from pipe dreams to goals we’ve actually been putting in the work for—there’s little to no framework here—reframes seemingly impossible goals into ones that don’t seem so daunting as a result. I should also take a moment to recognize the sheer privilege that comes with being able to say I’ve crossed off any, let alone two, of the aforementioned list items; by no means am I claiming that anyone could just as easily access these opportunities.
Okay, what does this actually mean? The pandemic has shown me that, at any given moment, our world could turn upside down. Forget bucket lists; forget impossibility. Instead of compiling bucket lists, we should start compiling the smaller list items within “going skydiving,” for example, that will help us reach our wildest dreams, little by little.
