Bury Your Bucket List

I have never quite understood the allure of bucket lists—inventories laden with unticked boxes paraded as future evidence of a life fully lived. They drive us to indiscriminately chase experiences and accumulate things, usually ones that someone else has deemed notable or particularly exhilarating: climb Everest, go skydiving, ride camels in the Sahara Desert, drive cross-country from LA to NYC. This is not at all to say that aspirations are misplaced, or that adventure is not a vital. But is your bucket list actually made up of the dreams you want to bring forward in service of the life you're creating? Is it made up of the things you want to have done—with priority—before you die?

In this era dominated by “30 under 30” lists, social media highlight reels, and the race to signal , I feel like the lines between aspiration and compulsion have blurred. The number of people who have told me about seemingly arbitrary life milestones they want to hit by a certain age, or the obscene dollar amounts in the bank that will one day grant them permission to finally live the way they want—with scarcely no rationale behind their chosen milestones, financial targets, or temporal benchmarks—bewilder me. It’s like they downloaded a list of requisite activities for having “lived,” collecting experiences like badges in a video game. Or Foursquare. (Remember that?) ?

In this fear of missing out, I fear many people are missing the point. T.S. Eliot’s observation, "We had the experience, but missed the meaning,” strikes a chord. Taken in full context, the famous line is far more bleak than what I am here to suggest. That is, these pursuits, these unrelenting quests for the extraordinary, often suggest that happiness dwells in a future state—a horizon painted with unchecked accomplishments.

But joy is a present experience. There is no planning for what will make you happy or bring you fulfillment in the future; those desires are driven by a version of you that may not exist when the time comes. Too many people surrender their joy for an idea they once had by an outdated self-image. To me, the bucket list is a result of an existence that is constrained and over-reasoned. One symptomatic of a tendency to “veer deliberately towards the rational, to cling solely to the experiences that are directly observable by others,” as Katherine May writes.

But your life should feel better than it looks.?

I believe in slow-burning, soul-nourishing, longitudinal life goals. Goals that illuminate the quality of my existence—a life measured against my values, my benchmarks, and my aspirations for living fully. Yes, I am writing my first book and have plans for several more, but I am far more invested in becoming a prolific writer and in the ways writing fortifies my ideas, expands my perspectives, and strengthens my relationship to creativity and to myself. The intention of buying an apartment in Paris in the next few years dovetails into my efforts to improve as a student of French. I hold a vision of marrying my spiritual partner, and nurturing a conscious relationship with someone who sees our relationship as a container for love, healing, and mutual growth. I aspire to one day take my four nieces and nephews on a two-week family vacation.

More than a collection of moments, longitudinal goals call for dedication of time and effort over the long term: the patient gardener sowing seeds and tending to their garden with the understanding that the real magic is in watching them grow. They ask you to cultivate the relationships and experiences that expand you, that breathe life into your years, not just a few days.

“A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams,” asserts Bertrand Russell. This life-by-checklist approach leaves no room to let enough in: enough ideas, enough curiosity, enough agility, enough exuberant magic of existence.

What if we made a list not of things to do, but of moments to savor?

With joy in the now,

Daria