How to Outlive Your Bucket List

When you’re young, making a bucket list – things you want to do before you die — feels like you’re choosing prizes that will arrive in the mail later. I’ll take fluency in Italian, please, a 300-lb bench press, and a swim in the Nile. I’ll definitely want to drive a Ferrari on the Autobahn at some point. How about a PhD?

The most famous list like this belonged to John Goddard, who made a truly audacious one at age 15 (ride an ostrich, land a plane on an aircraft carrier, study these twelve primitive cultures, learn those five musical instruments, etc.) and then spent his entire life doing most of them. He did 109 out of 127, many of which were clusters of smaller goals:

113. Become proficient in the use of a plane, motorcycle, tractor, surfboard, rifle, pistol, canoe, microscope, football, basketball, bow and arrow, lariat and boomerang

I made my first list on an otherwise crummy day, after reading about Goddard in Chicken Soup for the Soul. I loved that you could sit down and design an incredible future like this. I made my last one in 2009, as my twenties were coming to a close, and by then I was feeling my first hints of doubt about the whole concept.

After all, how do you know you’ll always want to do these things? Isn’t it just a list of what sounded good on the day you wrote it? How did Goddard make all these genuine commitments at 15?

And can you really “check off” these aspirations? Once I’ve visited London, that must mean my London-desire has now been satisfied for life. I’d be obligated to visit Istanbul and Tokyo before returning to London, to make sure I’m living the life I really want.

This creeping doubt is surely why I published a post a few years later called “In Defense of the Serious Bucket List.” I had to preserve the idea that my future would take the form of a long list of photogenic peak experiences.

Not long after that, I stopped checking and updating the list. It’s been sitting on this website ever since, visited by thousands of people a year. At the top it still says, “Here is what I plan to do before I die. It will be kept current.”

This unresolved list occasionally bugged me when I remembered it. After ten years of ignoring it, I finally checked on it to determine:

1. Had I done any of these things in the meantime?
2. Are the remaining items still important to me?
3. Given how much we change over time, does the bucket list idea even make sense?

How many goals I’ve completed

When I checked, I found I’d done another fifteen, which brings me to about half (55 of 113). Most of these were on the easy end — reading books, visiting cities. I certainly haven’t done half of the work the list entails.

Do I still care about these goals?

Some of them, yes. Others are so unimportant that they must have only appealed to me on the day they were written. For example, I had “Attend South by Southwest” on there, and today I don’t even remember what that is. It’s a music festival, right? I’m guessing people were talking about it on Twitter that day and I had some FOMO. I wonder if I ever even Googled it.

Many more items had been throwaway additions like that. The Internet Wayback Machine tells me I had already chopped the original 2009 list from 150 to 113, mostly removing silly, arbitrary items like ride a Harley-Davidson, take on a protégé (?), and live in France for “at least a few months.”

Of what’s left today, I do care about many of them, but very few seem so important I need to do them before I die. I would like to get to Istanbul one day, but I won’t be thinking of it on my deathbed.

So the list’s status today is “mostly passing fancies.” It’s not a document I’ve ever operated by, but I do appreciate it as a record of my thoughts at the time. Rather than let it become another dead-internet relic, I added my present-day thoughts to the existing list for future visitors.

Do bucket lists make sense at all?

I’m an advocate of setting and achieving audacious goals, but planning a lifetime’s worth at once doesn’t seem practical.

When you’re grabbing ideas from the air like that, there’s no sense of what’s being traded off. For most goals, 95% of the experience is just paying the cost. You want to drive a rented Ferrari on the Autobahn, but in real life that includes making an extra ten thousand dollars you could have spent on so many other things. Most of those other things would add more to your life than an afternoon in a supercar, which is why you haven’t done it and never will. It’s like the Little Red Hen lesson again and again — and who will help me pay for the Ferrari?

Also, when you brainstorm goals by the dozen, you end up grabbing a lot of arbitrary goals you’ve seen elsewhere. I had “read To Kill a Mockingbird” on my list forever. Since then, I’ve chosen hundreds of other books over it. Why did I read Stephen King’s It instead of achieving two or three of my lifelong goals? I also had Geneva on my list of cities to visit. I can’t name a single thing I want to do or see in Geneva. I hear there’s a lake or something?

So do bucket lists work? Probably not in the form they usually take. Most of them are modeled on Goddard’s, or on lists modeled on his, and he was a very unusual person. By the time his list was first published (in LIFE magazine in 1972), finishing it (and talking about it) was his full-time job.

Where I left it

I asked myself if I still think of anything in bucket-list terms — what am I actually determined to do before I die? Over a couple of days I came up with sixteen items, five of which were on my original list in some form.

These items had a different tone than the globetrotting stuff I’d always defaulted to. The old list focused on exciting experiences, and doing things that make a person “interesting.” I hadn’t realized it, but none of them really involved other people, except as ambience.

The new list is mostly has to do with ideas I want to get across, lifelong personal challenges I want to conquer, and a group of people I want to help who have those same problems. I’m not going to publish a list of these goals anywhere, I’m just going to do them.

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Do you have a bucket list? How’s it going?

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