In director Rob Reiner's 2008 comedy The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman portrayed a pair of men who discover that they are dying, and then decide to fulfill checklists of experiences and accomplishments that they want to have before their lives are over. The movie was a huge hit, in no small part because the concept of making a checklist of things to do before one dies seems to really resonate with people, particularly boomers.
In a recent speech at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, for example, former President Bill Clinton told listeners that he actually has two bucket lists. The B-list includes feats such as running a marathon and climbing Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, things that "would be fun to do but doesn't amount to a hill of beans whether I get to do it or not." His priority A-list, in contrast, includes living long enough to see his daughter Chelsea have children. Beyond that, the former President would like to see a day when "all the grandchildren of the world will have the chance in the not-too-distant future to live their own dreams and not die before their time."
I've tried fruitlessly to figure out who actually came up with the term "bucket list," but the concept of making a list of things to do before you die is far from new. President Clinton's half-hearted ambition of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro immediately brings to mind Ernest Hemingway's 1936 short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," about a writer on an African safari who is stricken with a fatal bacterial infection and spends his last hours running down the mental list of his life's great experiences and wondering why he didn't get around to writing about them. And if you grew up in the 1960s, you probably remember an old TV show, Run For Your Life, which starred Ben Gazzara as Paul Bryan, a lawyer who is told by a doctor during the opening credits that he's got a fatal disease and only has a short time to live.
Doctor: "What are you going to do?"
Bryan: "I have no family. I haven't taken a day off since law school...I guess I'll try to squeeze 30 years of living into one, or two."
As far as I can recall, Paul Bryan didn't seem to draw up a bucket list, per se. Instead, in a spontaneous Jack Kerouac-like fashion, he simply wandered from one glamorous locale to another, dabbling in various exotic pastimes, from skydiving to driving race cars. In the process, of course, he became involved in a lot of people's lives--particularly beautiful women--and found frequent opportunities to fix problems and/or heroically stand up to assorted greedy millionaires, biker gangs and communist spies. Think of it as the hedonist's version of economist Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory, that those acting in their own self-interest tended to benefit humanity as a whole. In any case, TV viewers liked it enough that Bryan actually got a bit of a reprieve from his initial one-to-two-year prognosis, and stayed alive for three TV seasons.
I kind of like the Paul Bryan approach. But it's probably a bit too unstructured for midlife boomers who've become addicted to checking off boxes on one of the myriad list-making apps available for their iPhones. It's more our generation's style to sign up for a self-help web site such as 43things.com, where we can list our goals for the world to see, and see how they measure up against others' lists. If you dream of someday playing a song on the harp, for example, you'll be cheered to know that 267 other users share your desire. (On the other hand, if you would die happy knowing that you'd danced in a Lady Gaga video, only three other users share that particular aspiration.)
So what are your thoughts on bucket lists? Do you have one? What's on it? Or does the idea creep you out? Let's get a discussion going. As further food for thought, here are journalist John Tierney's suggestions for your bucket list, published in Forbes back in 2000.