They get chatting and sure enough within a scene or two the pair of them are blowing the billionaire’s dosh, jetting round the world doing bucket-list stuff. In the process they learn all about themselves and the nature of friendship and what actually matters in this little life of ours.
I won’t tell you the ending for fear of reducing you to tears of derision, but suffice to say I’ve seen less corny fields of maize. The film made millions, of course. It also flung into the general consciousness a phrase that has taken root – the bucket list.
The bucket list is, as the blessed Zackham spelled out, a list of things to do before you die. But no one composes a list of things to do after they die. So a bucket list is merely a list of things we’d like to do and we already have a name for that. It’s a wish list.
But a wish list carries a note of fantasy, a sense of “if only”. A bucket list, in contrast, is written more in expectation than in hope. These are the things that I intend to do to validate my life. I shall go up the Eiffel Tower, see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, ride a camel across the Gobi, and because of these affirming experiences, my life will be clothed in a sense of achievement and I shall go to my grave with a grin. I shall have lived.
Well now, let’s start with the word experience. It is the travel agent’s pet. Experience the magic of an Arabian souk, the soaring silence of a balloon flight, the thrill of a ride on a steam train.
The implication is always that the experience will bring feelings that transcend the ordinary. But the reality is, well, the reality. To be hauled by a steam train feels remarkably like being hauled by any other form of train, plus smoke. A balloon flight is briefly a novelty that soon becomes something that you look forward to ending. And a souk is a cramped mall without the air conditioning.
As we instinctively already half-know, there is no transcendence. Going up the Eiffel Tower does not differ in kind from going up the Sky Tower, or the Bridle Path or the stairs to bed.
But there is another subtler reason we haven’t done the things on our bucket list. We didn’t want to. Because if we did want to, if we really and truly longed to ride that camel, we would have found a way to do so.
The truth of the matter is that, barring gross misfortune, most of us get what we want. If we’ve held down the same job for 50 years it’s because we wanted to. Every day for half a century we’ve chosen the comforts of home and routine over the risk of the unfamiliar. And we are wise. Riding that camel across the Gobi would be sweltering by day, freezing by night, monotonous, dangerous and pointless. Our routine lives are more worthwhile than that, more honest, caring, purposeful and better.
As a species we have an almost limitless capacity for self-delusion and the bucket list feeds neatly into it. The aim of ticking off its items is not the items themselves, but to convince ourselves as the grave looms that we are the sort of person who does such things, rather than the sort of person we actually are. One who lives modestly and kindly, and who is all the better for it.
