THE LIFE WE POSTPONE: The Bucket-List Problem
I don't have anything against bucket lists.
Let's establish that before somebody assumes I'm suggesting everyone cancel their trip to Japan and spend the rest of their life doing jigsaws in Northamptonshire.
Travel.
Climb mountains.
Swim somewhere beautiful.
See the Northern Lights.
Jump out of an aeroplane if voluntarily leaving a perfectly functional aircraft appeals to you.
Go somewhere you've always wanted to go.
Do something that scares you.
Collect memories.
Have adventures.
Brilliant.
What bothers me is something underneath all of that.
The increasingly common idea that an ordinary life somehow needs extraordinary experiences to prove it was properly lived.
We talk about the bucket list as though life is a game with achievements to unlock.
Countries visited.
Mountains climbed.
Restaurants eaten in.
Things jumped from.
Animals swum beside.
Festivals attended.
Cities ticked off.
Experiences accumulated.
Then eventually, presumably, you die with enough boxes completed to receive a certificate confirming that you did indeed participate.
And I can't help thinking:
What if you completed the entire fucking list and still didn't particularly enjoy most Tuesdays?
We replaced collecting things with collecting experiences
There has been a huge cultural shift over the last few decades towards experiences.
And psychologically, there are good reasons for it.
A substantial body of consumer research suggests people often derive more satisfaction from experiential purchases — travel, meals, entertainment, activities — than from buying material possessions.
Experiences tend to become part of our identity.
They often involve other people.
They generate memories.
They invite less direct comparison than possessions.
And the enjoyment can exist before, during and after the event through anticipation, the experience itself and remembering it later.
That all makes sense to me.
I would generally rather spend money doing something with my family than adding another object to the house that we will eventually forget we own.
But human beings are incredibly talented at taking a useful idea and turning it into another competition.
So:
Buy experiences, not things
quietly became:
Acquire better experiences than everyone else.
And now experiences can function remarkably like possessions.
Not stored in cupboards.
Stored in identity.
I've been there.
I've done that.
I've seen this.
I've climbed that.
I've eaten there.
I've travelled to thirty-eight countries.
Experiences become another way of answering:
Who am I, and how successfully am I doing life?
There is literally research on the “experiential CV”
I thought this idea was fascinating before discovering that researchers had effectively given it a name.
Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz studied what they called the consumption of collectable experiences.
They were interested in something seemingly irrational.
Why do people sometimes deliberately choose unusual, extreme or even less pleasurable leisure experiences?
Why sleep in a freezing ice hotel?
Why eat something bizarre mainly because you've never eaten it before?
Why choose an experience partly because it makes a better story?
Their experiments suggested one answer was a productivity orientation.
People who are strongly motivated to use time productively can carry that mentality into leisure.
Instead of simply enjoying time off, they continue trying to achieve.
They collect experiences.
Complete them.
Tick them off.
Build what the researchers called an “experiential CV.”
Leisure itself becomes productive.
That phrase is fucking brilliant.
An experiential CV.
Because it describes something I think we've all seen.
The person isn't merely travelling.
They're completing South America.
They're not simply running.
They're collecting marathons.
They're not just visiting somewhere interesting.
It's country number forty-seven.
They're not having an experience.
They're adding another line to the document proving they've experienced enough.
And I'm not criticising the activity.
I understand collecting things.
I understand goals.
I understand the satisfaction of completion.
If somebody wants to visit every country on Earth, fucking brilliant. What an adventure.
The question is whether the experience exists for itself or whether it has become another unit of achievement.
Because if even leisure has targets, when exactly do we stop performing?
Productivity follows us everywhere
This connects horribly well with the rest of modern adulthood.
We have already turned exercise into data.
Steps.
Heart rate.
VO2 max.
Calories.
Personal bests.
We turn reading into books per year.
Travel into countries.
Running into medals.
Learning into certifications.
Hobbies into side businesses.
Creative interests into content.
Sleep into scores.
Meditation into streaks.
Even relaxation can become something you are apparently doing better or worse than somebody else.
And then we wonder why people struggle to switch off.
We haven't switched activity.
We've simply changed dashboards.
You leave work, where performance is measured, and enter leisure, where performance is also measured.
Different clothes.
Same nervous system.
There is something wonderfully absurd about working all week under targets, escaping on holiday, and immediately opening an app to check whether you've completed enough sights.
The bucket list gives experiences a hierarchy
Bucket lists don't usually contain:
Have a really funny Tuesday with my wife.
Walk the dog on a cold morning and enjoy it.
Cook something unexpectedly good.
Spend an afternoon talking bollocks with an old friend.
Make my children laugh so hard they can't speak.
Sit somewhere quiet without wanting anything.
Have thousands of ordinary dinners with people I love.
They're not dramatic enough.
A bucket list requires things worthy of the list.
Researchers examining bucket-list culture in tourism have argued that the format creates what they call an imperative experiential discourse — language that doesn't simply describe interesting experiences, but presents particular experiences as things people should do.
Essential.
Unmissable.
Once in a lifetime.
Before you die.
The same research argues that bucket lists can become part of identity construction, with certain travel experiences treated almost as necessary components of a meaningful modern life.
You can see the language everywhere.
50 Places You Must Visit Before You Die.
Must?
Says who?
I have enough compulsory shit in my life already without Machu Picchu becoming another obligation.
Adventure has become evidence
This is where social media has inevitably complicated things.
Again, I'm not going to make the lazy argument that nobody travelled before Instagram.
Humans have always explored.
Pilgrimages, expeditions, grand tours, gap years and travel writing existed long before somebody invented the ability to photograph their breakfast for 600 acquaintances.
Nor does posting a holiday photograph mean you didn't enjoy the holiday.
Sharing can extend enjoyment, preserve memories and connect us with people.
Research on travel sharing finds plenty of positive motivations, including enjoyment, helping others and preserving experiences.
But experiences can also signal identity and status.
Recent research into conspicuous travel and social-media self-presentation has examined exactly that relationship: travel can become one of the ways people construct and display who they are.
Again, not inherently bad.
Humans have always signalled identity.
The car.
The watch.
The clothes.
The postcode.
The job title.
Now perhaps the experience itself joins the collection.
Look where I went.
Look what I did.
Look how alive I am.
And eventually something can shift.
You don't merely experience the moment.
Some tiny part of you begins watching yourself having it.
Is this photographable?
Is this worth sharing?
Does this count?
Have I captured it?
Will people understand how amazing this is?
You can be standing somewhere extraordinary while mentally constructing evidence that you stood somewhere extraordinary.
That's a strange way to inhabit a moment.
Even extraordinary experiences can become work
There is emerging tourism research looking at the stress involved in sharing travel experiences online and the pressure of positive self-presentation.
A 2025 study, for example, found that people can experience stress around sharing tourism content while nevertheless continuing to share it, with positive self-presentation playing an important role in that process.
A separate conceptual paper has proposed that the intention to share can sometimes interfere with psychological engagement in the experience itself, although that particular model remains a theoretical proposal requiring further empirical testing.
That feels important.
Because the experience economy was supposed to liberate us from material accumulation.
Instead, we found a way to accumulate experiences.
Then document them.
Compare them.
Rank them.
Optimise them.
And occasionally become stressed while proving that we're enjoying them.
That's an impressive achievement even by modern standards.
Extraordinary experiences genuinely are extraordinary
None of this changes the fact that extraordinary experiences can be fucking brilliant.
There are things that stay with you forever.
Places that reset your sense of scale.
Moments when you feel tiny in the best possible way.
Things you do once and talk about for decades.
Research by Amit Bhattacharjee and Cassie Mogilner found that extraordinary experiences can be powerful sources of happiness and self-definition.
But their research contained another finding that I find considerably more interesting.
Across eight studies, the value people placed on ordinary versus extraordinary experiences changed with their perception of time.
Younger people, who generally perceived a more expansive future, derived relatively more happiness from extraordinary experiences.
As people became older — or perceived time as more limited — ordinary experiences became increasingly important.
Eventually, ordinary experiences could generate as much happiness as extraordinary ones.
The researchers argued that as time feels more finite, people increasingly define themselves through the everyday experiences that actually make up their lives.
That stopped me.
Because perhaps age doesn't simply make people boring.
Perhaps age makes people notice the maths.
The extraordinary experience is memorable precisely because it is rare.
The ordinary experience is most of your fucking life.
Most of your life will never make the list
Think about the people you love.
If you are lucky enough to have a partner for fifty years, the overwhelming majority of your relationship will not be extraordinary.
It will be tea.
Dinner.
School runs.
Shopping.
TV.
Arguments about where something has been put.
Dog walks.
Cleaning.
Driving.
Sitting around.
Going to bed.
Getting up.
Conversations you've forgotten by the following morning.
Thousands upon thousands of completely unremarkable interactions.
And those interactions are the relationship.
The anniversary in Venice is wonderful.
But Venice is not where the marriage lives.
The marriage lives in the kitchen.
It lives in the car.
It lives in stupid private jokes.
It lives in knowing how the other person takes their coffee.
It lives in laughing at something nobody else would understand.
It lives in Tuesday night.
The extraordinary moments decorate a relationship.
The ordinary moments are it.
The same is true of childhood
Ask parents about the best moments of having children and they will often mention milestones.
Birth.
First steps.
First words.
Christmas.
Holidays.
Birthdays.
School performances.
And those moments matter enormously.
But childhood doesn't mainly happen there.
It happens while looking for a missing shoe at 7:42 in the morning.
Walking the dog.
Making packed lunches.
Reading the same book for the fifteenth time.
Sitting on the sofa.
Picking them up from school.
Hearing some unnecessarily detailed story about something another child said at lunchtime.
Making them laugh.
Getting annoyed with them.
Apologising.
Cuddling them when they're upset.
Driving somewhere.
Doing absolutely nothing impressive.
Then one day those ordinary things stop.
No announcement.
No ceremony.
The last bedtime story probably won't feel like the last bedtime story.
The last time they instinctively reach for your hand won't be marked in the calendar.
The final time they ask you to play something childish may happen without either of you noticing.
Life is full of last times disguised as completely normal days.
And none of them appear on a bucket list.
Holidays don't permanently fix ordinary life
Travel and holidays can be restorative.
Research supports that.
Vacations can improve wellbeing, reduce exhaustion and provide recovery from work.
The problem is that the effect often fades after returning.
A meta-analysis of vacation research found positive effects on health and wellbeing, but those effects reduced relatively quickly once people returned to work.
A Dutch study involving more than 1,500 people found vacationers were happier before their trips — possibly because of anticipation — but most were not significantly happier than non-vacationers afterwards. Only people reporting very relaxing holidays experienced a notable short-term post-holiday boost, and that too faded.
Another longitudinal study following thousands of Dutch participants found only small long-term relationships between vacationing and happiness, with the number of trips and days away not strongly predicting happiness among holidaymakers.
That doesn't mean holidays don't matter.
It means they aren't magic.
You eventually come home.
And the life you come home to matters enormously.
That is the part I think we underestimate.
I don't want eleven months that require rescuing
I love holidays.
I love going away with my family.
I enjoy exploring somewhere new.
I understand the excitement of counting down to a trip.
The anticipation itself is part of the pleasure.
But I don't want the holiday to perform emergency resuscitation on the rest of my year.
I don't want to spend eleven months enduring life so I can feel alive for two weeks.
I don't want every Monday to be the price of Saturday.
I don't want five working days to purchase two living days.
I don't want decades of ordinary adulthood compensated for by photographs of extraordinary moments.
The ratio is terrible.
A good holiday should enhance a decent life.
Not temporarily replace one you hate.
We misunderstand what makes something valuable
Scarcity does strange things to us.
If something happens once, it feels important.
If something happens every day, we stop seeing it.
The first coffee overlooking an incredible landscape gets photographed.
The thousandth coffee opposite your partner doesn't.
Yet which one has more influence on the shape of your life?
The extraordinary moment burns brighter in memory.
The ordinary moment compounds.
This is why research on savouring interests me.
Savouring broadly refers to deliberately attending to and appreciating positive experiences rather than simply letting them pass unnoticed.
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of twenty randomised controlled trials involving 4,805 participants found moderate overall benefits from savouring interventions across positive psychological outcomes and reductions in negative emotional symptoms, while also noting the limitations and variation within the evidence.
Experience-sampling research following adults aged 25 to 85 also found that people were particularly likely to savour moments involving close social partners, and that greater tendencies to savour were associated with psychological wellbeing.
That sounds incredibly obvious when stripped of the psychological terminology.
Notice the good bit while it's happening.
But apparently we're not always very good at that.
Especially when the good bit looks ordinary.
We may appreciate ordinary life more when we realise it is finite
There is something almost cruel about the way perspective changes with age.
When you are young, ordinary days appear unlimited.
Another breakfast.
Another walk.
Another bedtime.
Another school run.
Another Christmas.
Another conversation with your parents.
Why would you treasure something you believe you have an infinite supply of?
Then time starts revealing itself.
Parents age.
Children grow.
Bodies change.
Friends move.
People die.
You begin realising that ordinary moments were never unlimited.
They just arrived frequently enough to create the illusion.
Research into daily positive events suggests everyday positive experiences are associated with wellbeing across adulthood and may become particularly important for positive wellbeing later in life.
Maybe wisdom is partly discovering the value of ordinary life before scarcity forces you to.
The bucket list can become another way of postponing
There is an irony here.
Bucket lists are supposed to be about not postponing life.
Do it before you're too old.
Go now.
Experience everything.
Yet they can accidentally reinforce the exact idea this series is questioning:
Real life is somewhere else.
On the mountain.
In Bali.
At the festival.
In the restaurant.
During the road trip.
At the finish line.
After you book the flight.
Once you have enough money.
When you're finally doing something worthy of remembering.
Meanwhile, there is dinner tonight.
Your partner is sitting opposite you.
Your child wants to tell you something.
The dog needs walking.
The sun is out.
Somebody you care about has sent you a message.
Your ordinary life is happening quietly in the background while you plan the extraordinary one.
That's the risk.
I still want adventures
I absolutely want adventures.
This is not my conversion into somebody who intends to spend the rest of his life appreciating a particularly nice mug.
I want to see places.
Try things.
Travel.
Explore.
Do stupid shit.
Take the girls somewhere they'll remember when they're adults.
Say yes to opportunities.
Experience things that make me nervous.
I hope my life contains lots of extraordinary moments.
But I don't want them because my ordinary life has failed.
I want both.
That's the distinction.
I want a life that is already good and occasionally becomes spectacular.
Not a life that is routinely shit and occasionally looks spectacular.
There is no experiential final score
Maybe this is what we forget.
There is nobody counting.
No one at the end asks for your passport stamps.
There is no minimum number of countries.
No required altitude.
No compulsory number of transformative experiences.
No panel reviewing whether you lived courageously enough.
No final LinkedIn post.
No experiential CV required.
At some point, the document closes whether you completed it or not.
And perhaps that is liberating.
Because it means you are allowed to stop proving that you lived.
You can simply live.
Make the normal bit better
If I had to choose between two lives, the choice increasingly seems obvious.
Life one contains fifty astonishing experiences surrounded by thousands of days I would rather skip.
Life two contains fewer spectacular stories but an ordinary Tuesday I generally enjoy.
Give me Tuesday.
Give me breakfast with people I love.
Give me meaningful work.
Give me enough money.
Give me laughter.
Give me walks.
Give me curiosity.
Give me time.
Give me stupid conversations.
Give me family dinners that nobody photographs.
Give me a partner I can be completely ridiculous with.
And yes, occasionally give me somewhere fucking incredible to go.
Because extraordinary experiences matter.
They stretch life.
They create memories.
They give us stories.
Sometimes they change us.
But ordinary experiences do something extraordinary experiences can never do.
They make up almost all of our existence.
That means the biggest opportunity for improving a life probably isn't adding another item to the bucket list.
It is improving the bit between them.
Because one day, when time finally feels scarce enough, I suspect many of the moments we would give almost anything to repeat won't be the ones we travelled halfway around the world to collect.
They'll be the ones we barely noticed because we assumed there would always be another.
Sources
Bhattacharjee, A. & Mogilner, C. (2014), Happiness from Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences, Journal of Consumer Research. Across eight studies, extraordinary experiences were strongly linked with happiness among younger people, while ordinary experiences became increasingly important as age increased or time was perceived as limited.
Keinan, A. & Kivetz, R. (2011), Productivity Orientation and the Consumption of Collectable Experiences, Journal of Consumer Research. The authors found that productivity orientation can extend into leisure, increasing preference for unusual and collectable experiences and encouraging what they termed an “experiential CV”.
Thurnell-Read, T. (2017), What’s on your Bucket List?: Tourism, identity and imperative experiential discourse, Annals of Tourism Research. The paper analyses bucket-list culture as a form of discourse connecting valued travel experiences with identity, status and ideas about what people ought to experience.
Gilovich, T., Kumar, A. & Jampol, L. (2015), A wonderful life: experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness, Journal of Consumer Psychology. The review summarises evidence that experiential purchases often provide more satisfaction than material purchases through social connection, identity and lower social comparison.
Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilovich, T. (2020), Spending on doing promotes more moment-to-moment happiness than spending on having, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Experience-sampling data found greater momentary happiness during experiential than material consumption.
Nawijn, J., Marchand, M. A., Veenhoven, R. & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2010), Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday, Applied Research in Quality of Life. Vacationers reported greater happiness before travel, while post-trip happiness generally returned towards previous levels; only very relaxing holidays produced a notable short-lived post-trip boost.
De Bloom, J. et al. (2009), Do we recover from vacation? Meta-analysis of vacation effects on health and well-being. The review found small positive vacation effects that tended to fade after employees returned to work.
Tung et al. (2026), Effectiveness of savoring interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. Twenty randomised trials involving 4,805 participants produced a moderate pooled effect across emotional and positive psychological outcomes.
Momentary Savoring in Daily Life in an Adult Life-Span Sample (2025), Emotion. Experience-sampling data from adults aged 25–85 found savouring was particularly associated with moments involving close social partners and was related to psychological wellbeing.
Research gaps
The established “experiential advantage” does not mean every experience produces more happiness than every material purchase. Effects vary according to personality, type and quality of experience, social context, financial circumstances and a person's ability to savour experiences. Some research has found the experiential advantage to be weaker or absent among people whose buying tendencies are more material-oriented.
The distinction between ordinary and extraordinary experiences also requires caution. Bhattacharjee and Mogilner's findings demonstrate an age- and time-perspective-related pattern across their studies; they do not establish that ordinary experiences are universally superior later in life or that younger people should prioritise extraordinary experiences.
Research into the “experiential CV” demonstrates that productivity orientation can influence preferences for unusual or collectable experiences. It does not establish that everybody with a bucket list is motivated by status, productivity or impression management.
Similarly, research analysing bucket-list discourse and social-media travel presentation supports the idea that experiences can contribute to identity and status signalling, but this should not be generalised into the claim that people travel primarily for social approval. Travel motivations are highly varied and commonly include curiosity, connection, rest, learning and simple enjoyment.
Vacation research also should not be interpreted as suggesting holidays are pointless because their wellbeing effects fade. Temporary recovery, anticipation, shared memories and relief from work may all have genuine value even without producing permanent increases in global life satisfaction.
Finally, the central proposition of this essay — that extraordinary experiences can sometimes be used to compensate for an unsatisfying ordinary life — is a philosophical synthesis rather than a directly established causal relationship. Existing research strongly supports the psychological importance of both extraordinary and everyday positive experiences, but it does not provide a simple empirical formula for how a person should balance them.