107. Bucket Lists Are Dumb

What in life deserves our time and attention, and what things don't? I hope that as we consider that question, along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Bucket Lists Are Dumb.”

There's someone on Reddit who plans to shave their head and get a tattoo on it and then grow their hair back out so they can have a secret tattoo. A few years back, a ninety-nine-year-old Dutch woman asked to be handcuffed and put in prison even though she hadn't committed a crime. Why, you might ask?

Well, because these things were on their “bucket lists”. These ones made me laugh, but when I really think of a bucket list, I tend to imagine the panic gasping of a drowning person trying to find meaning in their life. I can't help but feel that having a list of fun but pointless things to accomplish before you die seems like it might be the apex of dissatisfaction.

Don't get me wrong, I hope someday that I can do really cool things, but I sure hope those things aren't the things that define my life or whether or not I accomplished anything. I think the reason bucket lists are so appealing is because they offer us a direction, albeit a frivolous one. A bucket list is like the consumer version of a heroic life, where once the gold standard of accomplishment was how much you sacrificed, what courage you showed, how faithful you were, or how wise.

Today, we've replaced those with whether or not you saw the northern lights, went skydiving, or ate pasta in Italy. It's kind of an attempt to find meaning without obligation. Bucket lists are what we do if being interesting is our life's priority. Being able to post photos documenting all the cool things we do gives us the illusion of being relevant.

The other reason I think we're so fond of them is that we use them as secret status symbols disguised as self-discovery. They work well with the whole idea that one needs to get out there and see the world to become a more, quote, elevated person. What better way to show off our status than to show off our easy breezy life full of food, vacations, and fun times?

There's a subtle implication every time we show people the interesting things we're doing that we have the means to do it. I recognize some people just use a bucket list to set a goal to work towards, but why not give our goals more weight than our whims? Maybe some people need a bucket list to pull themselves out of monotony. 

Maybe they need it to get them out of their comfort zone, or maybe they need a crazy experience just to create a pattern of disruption in their otherwise toxic life. More often than not, though, these aren't the case, and instead, we use bucket lists to fill in for meaning. Lists are great. Even a bucket list can be great, but only if they're intended to serve a bigger purpose.

So, I create task lists every day at work. I don't do these lists because they make me feel accomplished, though. I do the list because they result in me getting more done and ultimately moving the ball forward on things that actually have a meaningful purpose. The kinds of experiences that really matter, in my mind at least, are the experiences we get from giving.

It doesn't matter how cool your life is if you never spend it in service of a real purpose. I hope we all get to make friends with Bedouins and swim with dolphins and put flowers on the grave of our favorite composer, but using that as a benchmark for success is a sad one. Exotic experiences can have an impact on our lives, no doubt, but at the end of the day, unless the experience did something good for someone, I'm not sure it matters whether it happened on your sofa or in Machu Picchu.

Maybe a trip to Tibet inspires you to give up your corporate aspirations to start an orphanage. But maybe if you had never left, you would have become a foster parent to children in your own hometown. Life doesn't need to be turned into a big scavenger hunt. We don't need to sacrifice a heroic life on the altar of consumerism.

Maybe I have it wrong actually, and bucket lists aren't actually the problem so much as what we put on them. What if we replaced number twenty-three, picking a president's nose at Mount Rushmore, and making regular visits to an assisted living facility to keep people company? What if instead of expending immense resources to engage in epic frivolity, we spent immense resources to engage in epic good?

There's no end to the number of righteous battles to be fought that could give your life story actual depth instead of just providing entertainment. When we die, I don't think people are going to judge our lives by our vacations, but rather how we impacted others for the better. When I've been to funerals, what I usually see happen is people maybe chuckle a bit about a person's adventurous life, but that's about all it gets.

I just don't see people getting up there and saying things like, "Well, Tom ran the Hobbiton Halfling Marathon when he was alive and was blessed by a Peruvian shaman while high on ayahuasca." People want to talk a little bit about your personality, but mostly they wanna talk about how you impacted their lives for the better.

They wanna talk about that time you really saved the day for them, or about that other time where you set aside other projects to be their support in a time of need. All that really seems to matter to anyone after we die is whether or not you were a good person. So I hope you don't choose to tattoo your head just in order to have a secret tattoo or to check yourself into prison.

If you were someone, I knew that did that, of course I'd laugh. But when everything is said and done, I'll be rooting for the focus of your life to shift away from being an interesting person to being a good person. There are so many fun things for us to do out there, and I hope we get to do a lot of it.

But all of that fun is never going to be the thing that ultimately defines our lives. This is Skipping Stones- “Bucket Lists Are Dumb.”. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com and if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe.

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