In the idle, affluent West, a clichéd conventional wisdom has evolved that living one’s “best life” entails having as many “experiences” as possible — specifically, aspirational, evocative, non-everyday undertakings or amusements commonly believed to engender feelings of existential fulfillment and ease fears of missing out on potentially obtainable pleasures. This effort ultimately proves pointless, however, as such purportedly enriching endeavors quickly dissolve into fading and fragmented memories that do nothing to soften the blow of our looming mortality.
01 One of the most irritating but inevitable manifestations of the American-inspired reductionist approach to life is the so-called “bucket list” — a mental compilation of adventures or achievements that a person with disposable time and money desires to have or accomplish before they die (or, more colorfully, “kick the bucket”), so they can be confident, in the end, that they’ve had a “full” or “successful” life. An entire industry has sprung up to render authoritative guidance on places one needs to go and things one needs to do to attain this elusive emotional goal, promoting various wonders and offerings of the world that allegedly cannot merely be studied and learned about, but must be directly and personally experienced in order to add any real, appreciable value to our otherwise paltry existence. Thus, the “bucket” has a parallel meaning, for it also symbolizes the conception of a person’s life as a kind of container to hold unique and reputedly rewarding experiences one might hope to gather on their distressingly short journey from the cradle to the grave. See Article 5.
02 Ironically, pursuing experiences in this manner is generally deemed to be more high-minded than seeking material things, even though the bucket list is an obvious extension of the materialist ethos — an attempt to transform intangible perceptions and feelings into pseudo-objects that can be acquired and collected and accumulated. Perhaps, then, the bucket could be more appropriately viewed as a shopping bag, into which frenzied experiential consumers desperately stuff as many “moments” as they can grab off the shelves before checking out. Alas, these eagerly sought-after wares are extremely perishable goods, for even our most vivid, vaunted experiences — or rather, our memories of them — don’t keep.
03 Since travel is a fixture on most bucket lists and is frequently identified as a key ingredient of a vibrant and engaging life, consider a hypothetical seven-day trip to Egypt, highlighted by visits to the Great Pyramid of Giza and other iconic sites along the Nile. For many people of ordinary means, this likely would be regarded as a peak experience that they expect to remember forever. Yet by the time they return home, they will have already forgotten most of it. By the following year, they’ll recall just a sliver, aided by photos and videos they took during their journey (if they can locate them) that are less illuminating than thousands of others they could have effortlessly obtained online. After a decade, there will be only a smattering of random images and anecdotes from the trip rattling around in their foggy brains, riddled with inaccuracies and not even necessarily including what they had previously thought to be the most important or resonating aspects of their tour.
04 Think about your own life. How much of yesterday do you remember, with any reasonable degree of clarity? Imagine that someone continuously recorded everything that happened, as seen through your eyes, to produce a 24-hour movie. What portion of that movie could you “watch” in your head right now? The period you were asleep (except for dreams) is a blank, so at the start your mental access is limited to, let’s say, only two-thirds of the day. If you cobbled together the elapsed time of all the discrete snippets within this conscious segment that you are able to concretely recall, do you think it would be an hour? Even 30 minutes? The latter result, which probably is still on the high side, represents only 2% of the entire 24-hour day. And that’s yesterday. What about the day before yesterday — how much of that day do you remember? What about a day last week, or last month, or last year? The vast majority of our lived experience isn’t memorized, no matter how memorable we might believe it to be.
05 An experience is like a new car that loses a significant portion of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot, and then continues to depreciate from there. It’s not merely the fact that our poor memories prevent us from adequately preserving and retaining our experiences; it’s that even the most well-remembered experiences don’t really do what wistful bucket-listers want them to. At most, they create a tenuous construct of a meaningful, satisfactory life; but they don’t actually make our basic situation any more palatable, or mitigate the impending catastrophe of our demise.
06 Whether they expressly articulate it or not, most bucketeers are motivated by their strong desire to avoid a particular kind of “deathbed scenario” in which, at the end of their lives, they deeply regret not doing enjoyable or fulfilling things they might have done. Sober warnings of this nature abound: “You only get one life, so make the most of it … Live for today, because you never know if there will be a tomorrow … Life is not a dress rehearsal … Live like you were dying …“ etc. Just about everyone nods at these admonishments, even if they fail to act accordingly. However, as a personal creed, the advice rings hollow, for several reasons.
07 First, no matter what we do, our lives are always full of regrets, and will end with plenty of them. We regret what we did as much as, if not more than, what we didn’t do. And we may even regret trying so hard to “get the most out of life” that we find we’ve spent more time racking up experiences than actually appreciating them as they’re transpiring. Having any experience necessarily precludes having an infinite number of other, alternate experiences, leaving us to wonder whether we made the right choice. That trip to Egypt might have cost you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness a royal wedding in London, or the chance to spend a few more days with your ailing father before he succumbed to cancer.
08 Second, no matter how much we do, we wish we could do more. One of the irremediable maladies of the human condition is chronic discontent. A celebrated mountaineer who successfully climbed the top nine summits of North America might bitterly rue the fact that he never scaled the tenth to his dying day. Few people will check off every item on their bucket list, and those who do might well view it as an indication that their list was too short. Social media and the wider internet bombard us with countless examples of more ambitious or enticing things others have done that we haven’t, and never will.
09 Third, some of the experiences we have diminish others we’ve had before. Suppose that bungee jumping is on your bucket list. Finally working up the courage to take the plunge, you come away convinced that it’s the ultimate rush. You’re proud of yourself for doing something new and daring, something far outside your usual comfort zone, and you brag about it to all your friends. Then, a few months later, you try skydiving, and, man, that’s on a whole other level. Your prior bungee jumping suddenly seems tame in comparison, the experience markedly devalued. Now you don’t talk or even think much about bungee jumping anymore, its once-indelible impression on your psyche almost entirely washed away.
10 Fourth, what memories we grasp of our fondest experiences often fail to give us solace in the precarious present as much as they make us long for the unrepeatable past. Such memories are bittersweet, because while they call to mind the happiest or most exhilarating moments we’ve ever had, they also remind us of what we can never have again. Even the clearest memories pale in comparison to the real thing. We don’t want to merely remember the best times of our lives; we want to literally relive them, if only we could.
11 Fifth, the more compelling things we’ve experienced in our lives, the more we yearn to go on living, even as our final day draws near, making our deaths seem all the more tragic. When the end is upon them, someone who concludes that they’ve had a full life might feel grateful, but they might also feel a greater sense of loss. They might readily trade all of their cherished memories for another year or two of making new ones. Despite their impressive tally of exciting adventures, they might envy the most boring person they know who remains in good health, no matter how mundane the rest of that person’s life appears likely to be. No amount of supposedly valuable experiences can buy us more time, which is what most of us want (or will want, when we run out) most of all.
12 There are no “worthy” lives or “wasted” lives; there are only lives, which we never asked for in the first place. See Article 3. They include subjectively good moments and bad moments, but mostly forgettable filler in between. No one gets a ribbon or a pat on the back for a job well done. No one “wins” at life or comes out ahead of anyone else, because oblivion awaits all of us on the other side of the finish line.
Great read!