My problem(s) with bucket lists

Rather than kicking the 🪣 I'd like to kick out the lists ✅

I love making lists. I have two separate list-making apps with half a dozen different lists in each, for various home and work endeavours. I sit with my green tea each morning and make a daily list. I am not an anti-list person at all, but I draw the line at one kind of list: the bucket list.

The burgeoning popularity of bucket lists for travellers

When I was younger, this concept of the “bucket list” didn’t exactly exist. It certainly didn’t have that name - that didn’t arise until the 2007 movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. It’s a great movie (check the preview below if you don’t know anything about it), but I wish it hadn’t spawned the pest that is the bucket list!

Since this movie popularised the concept of a bucket list - a list of things to do before you “kick the bucket”, or die, travel pages across magazines and the internet have gone wild for “bucket list destinations”. Travel media are encouraging travellers to see all the “important” places before they die: these lists often contains classics like the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu, and poor over-touristed Venice, just to name a few.

As I’ve got older (and hopefully slightly wiser), I’ve become more enraged by so-called “listicles” - travel articles or posts which list the places that you should go if you visit a particular city or country. I deliberately use the word “should”, because between these publications and the “peer pressure” you can experience from fellow travellers, it can feel like you really must go to these places. If you return home from a trip to Rome and you didn’t go to see the Colosseum, people will demand to know why you’d make such a bad choice.

My other issue with bucket lists is they tend to focus you on travelling just to tick off an item, rather than focusing on the broader experience. Most of the best travel experiences you have - chatting with a local shop-owner who tells you a fascinating snippet of local history, or having a Google Translate-facilitated conversation with a grandma who takes you home to taste her jam or pirogi or homemade Schnapps - are not the kind of activities you would ever think to list on a bucket list. I worry that those focused on list-ticking forget to take the time and space to deviate from plans and just enjoy what their trip puts in front of them.

A list just for you

Something many people miss is the fact that the movie origin of the bucket list as a concept didn’t even want you to go out and do the same things as everybody else.

In this scene, Morgan Freeman’s character has written a letter to his new friend, played by Jack Nicholson, after they’ve been on some crazy adventures together.

To summarise: it’s not about what you see! It’s about the people; it’s about joy. And it’s about your joy - what is meaningful and joyful for you, which is very individual.

An article in The Conversation last year summarised a lot of my thoughts on this, but with the added background of academic research undertaken by speaking to people who had been given a cancer diagnosis. The final paragraph is the important part, I think:

Travel can be deeply meaningful, as our study found. But a life well-lived need not be extravagant or adventurous. Finding what is meaningful is a deeply personal journey.

If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, it’s probably a good indication that travel is something meaningful to you. But in what way is it meaningful? What can you imagine about the experiences of travel you really want to have during the rest of the years you’ll have the privilege of travelling?

For me - and admittedly, this is as someone who’s been immensely lucky to spend time working in three other countries and thus travel to many parts of the world - my ideas of the kind of travel I want to do in the future are fairly random, esoteric, and largely unplanned. I have a fair bit of faith in the idea that where I go is not particularly important, but that going is the key part. I would like to spend more time in countries I know quite well and can speak (or make an attempt on) the language, like Germany and Japan. I want to visit friends I have in many parts of the world, and see how they live their lives: Canada, Morocco, Bhutan, Norway, Hong Kong, and many more. And I want to follow my eclectic interests in particular authors, animals, artists, businesses, history and more to visit places that can satisfy my curiosity.

That’s as close to a bucket list as I have, and I feel quite happy that it’s a list that will never be finished - there are always more experiences I can have like this, and I can return again and again (my next trip to Japan will be my fifth, including two years of living there) and still have new and interesting experiences. But likewise, whenever I’m unable to travel any more (let’s hope this is a really long time away!), I won’t have regrets on places I missed out on - I trust that as long as I am able to keep travelling, it will all be a rewarding experience, and someday from my nursing home I’ll be very happy to look back on these memories (and bore new friends with all my travel stories).

But, we are all different …

Now, if you have a cherished bucket list, go on and use it! I know we all think differently and we can still be friends. I just wanted to put my thoughts out there in case it helps anyone thinking similarly to feel better about their anti-bucket list notion.

Some listening for you

I thought I’d share a couple of episodes that reflect some of the kinds of travel I imagine doing more of in the future. That’s as close to a “bucket list” as I’ll get! For one, after chatting with Nicholas Wood recently about his company Political Tours, I would dearly love to take this kind of trip and get a true deep dive into the local political scene - Taiwan would be my first pick, as I mention in our chat.

Another of my favourite kinds of travel experiences is meeting up with friends in various parts of the world; my son and I have travelled or met up with our friend Cham in Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, England and most recently, his new home of Hong Kong. Wherever in the world we see Cham, we know it’s going to be an extra-special trip.

What kind of travel experiences do you hope to have in the future? And do you agree or disagree with my bucket list dislike?