I was fifty when the movie that started it all came out. Here’s the pitch

Corporate billionaire Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and working-class mechanic Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) have nothing in common except for their terminal illnesses. While sharing a hospital room together, they decide to leave it and do all the things they have ever wanted to do before they die according to their bucket list. In the process, both of them heal each other, become unlikely friends, and ultimately find joy in life.

Reading that, it’s easy to see why this is the movie that won the Village Voice Film Poll Award for Worst Film in 2007.

I went to see it because the trailer made it look better than the pitch and because Jack Nicholson was in it and by then, I was seeing him as the man I could become if I ever shut down my internal editor and let my snarling snark off its leash. I tried to take his performances as warnings, not role models but part of me always cheered him.

Here’s the trailer

There’s some debate about whether or not the movie minted the Bucket List term (the WSJ thinks it did) but it certainly popularised it. I think it’s worth remembering that the term was created as a device to launch an improbable, tear-jerking bromance between two terminally ill baby boomers. It may make a fine romance but that doesn’t make it something I want to incorporate in my life.

I’m part of that baby boomer generation. I’m not terminally ill but I am sixty-six, with a lot less life in front of me than behind me. In theory, now would be the perfect time to write my Bucket List and then spend the next decade ticking off the items on it so that I could die knowing that I’ve lived my life to the full.

It’s not going to happen. Bucket lists may make for a fine bromance movie but I think they are inimical to happiness in real life.

Here’s why.

Bucket lists are part of the gamification of life. They turn memories into merit badges and turn life into a series of selfies taken to prove to yourself and others that you’re living life to the full.

Bucket lists play on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). They draw on the fear that Thoreau was right when he said, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them’. Although the bucket list concept seems to be about winning by bringing joy into your life, it gets its energy from the fear that you’ve already lost and are staying quiet so that no one, including you, will notice.

It’s part of a managerial mindset that sees life as being about the achievement of measurable goals. That’s fine for making a business work but it’s a sterile way to live your life. Bucket lists make you define the goals and challenge you to meet them. Success is measured not by your level of joy or serenity but by how many items on the list have been ticked.

The bucket list presents happiness as a series of ‘peak’ events to be stored in your memory the way a miser stores gold coins. The problem is that life is more than a series of ‘peak’ events. Most of life happens between the peaks. To Live mainly for the peaks is to condemn yourself to long periods of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

The bucket list assumes that happiness can be planned and scheduled. It implies: Planning + Effort = Happiness. In my experience, moments of happiness are often happy accidents. Joy is ephemeral so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the things I remember most fondly are spontaneous moments of joy rather than carefully planned celebrations.

Finally, it seems to me that Bucket lists fail to understand that human desire is infinite and inexhaustible. It’s too vast to be contained within the confines of a list. It’s the nature of life to want more every day. I think Laura Mucha’s poem says this better than I can:

Just One

by Laura Mucha

One more mountain, just the one,one more trip away with Mum,one more apple rhubarb pie,one more amber-lilac sky.

One more chocolate – plain and dark,a peacock and a national park,Arctic iceberg, Shetland sheepand one more really good night’s sleep.

One more day of blazing heat,one more friend I’d like to meet,one more bike ride, one more hike, I’dtalk to every bird and bee,I’d soak them up, I’d set them freewith paint, with words, perhaps a song.

Life is short and life is long, so quickly please, before it’s gone.

Just one more poem.