Shelley Bridgeman: I hate bucket lists

Rose Kupa from Hastings was the streaker who ran onto the field during the New Zealand All Black Vs Argentina rugby game. Photo / File

"Bucket lists a show of egotistical madness" was the heading of a recent NZ Herald Letter to the Editor. "What is this unhealthy obsession with fulfilling bucket lists?" the writer asked. "This was the title of a very good and funny movie ... but its offshoot has been people ... inventing ... their own lists, increasingly doing extreme ... things that no sane person with a modicum of common sense and responsibility would consider in a thousand years."

In this letter the correspondent referred to the streaking incident which had occurred during the recent All Blacks game in Napier. News reports revealed that such an activity had been on the perpetrator's bucket list for seven years. There was the implication that an endeavour's presence on such a list elevated its status from questionable to reasonable. There was the unspoken suggestion that a streak performed as part of a considered plan (rather than some spontaneous whim) had a certain dignity associated with it - a gravitas that would not normally be connected with the act of running buck naked across a rugby field.

Not everyone bought the story though. Along with the correspondent above, many people did not believe that its mere presence on a bucket list made an otherwise objectionable, antisocial piece of behaviour any more acceptable. Yet in some people's minds, the bucket list has come to serve as a convenient smokescreen, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card with the potential to excuse all manner of unwise, even unsavoury, activities.

This notion has its origins in the 2007 movie in which Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson play terminally-ill men who attempt to realise their wish-list of things they want to do before they "kick the bucket". So "bucket list" entered the vernacular and a trend was born, inspiring many people to contemplate what activities or adventures they really want to experience.

"Things to do before you die" was something of a preoccupation in the noughties. In 2003 the New York Times bestseller 1,000 Places to See Before You Die was published. Hot on its heels came a raft of similarly themed publications, such as 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Somehow our mortality had become a novel and urgent way to package a list. It was compelling the first time we saw it but rapidly became tired.

Still, bucket lists took off - and not just amongst the elderly or the terminally ill. Even young healthy people started crafting a list of experiences to be checked off. It used to be called a wish-list or set of goals; now it has a far catchier label. One website defines a bucket list as "a list of all the goals you want to achieve, dreams you want to fulfill and life experiences you desire to experience before you die." (Would it be churlish to mention those last three words are redundant?)

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in a scene from The Bucket List.

Of course, the problem with most bucket lists is that the items on them tend to be irredeemably shallow and pointless - such as streaking during a rugby game. Indulgence and recklessness typically define lists full of places to see and adventure tourism activities to try. Bungee-jumping, sky-diving and jet-boating are staples on many such lists. Some people want to learn a language, run a marathon, adopt a new sport or take a hot-air balloon ride. Really worthwhile, public-spirited activities seldom feature on such lists. No one seems to want to engage in the pursuit of world peace or find a cure for cancer. Clearly, an unwritten (yet widely understood) rule is that bucket lists are meant to be frivolous and self-centred.

Neatly expressing my own reservations about bucket lists, a writer for The New Yorker said they represent "the YOLO-ization of cultural experience, whereby the pursuit of fleeting novelty is granted greater value than a patient dedication to an enduring attention." It's the sheer random nature of the goals - and the idea that an activity is not performed for its own sake but in order to complete some sort of personal scavenger hunt - that undoubtedly turns many people off the bucket list mania. When the core purpose of an activity becomes a superficial quest to acquire ticks in certain boxes, it surely trivialises both the experience itself and the life it is supposed to be enhancing.

Are you a fan of bucket lists? If so, what is on yours?