Bucket List

1600 words, 8 minute read

The first time I heard the term Bucket List, I cringed. Talk about ‘measuring out your life with coffee spoons’ (Eliot). But I’ve only recently begun to understand my instinctive aversion.

Apparently, we have an inalienable right to ‘pursue happiness’. I’m not relying solely on the Declaration of Independence here. “I just want to be happy/don’t I have a right to be happy/whatever makes you happy/you don’t make me happy anymore” are phrases we hear every day. Pity the poor bartenders and beauticians forced to earn a living by listening intently to these self-pitying memes, interjecting pre-programmed sighs where appropriate.

‘The pursuit of happiness’ is an oxymoron. Happiness is not a ‘thing’; it’s a ‘subjective form’ (Whitehead), an introspective state of mind. It can’t be pursued like a certain white whale. While external circumstances may or may not be more or less conducive to happiness, nothing makes us happy! Happiness is just one of many aspects an event may assume.

There is no word, ‘happyfication’, in the English language. Intuitively we understand that nothing can ‘make’ anyone happy; but we promptly forget that and set off down our own ‘whale road’ (Beowulf): “I’ll make you happy if it kills us!” 

I want to be happy. Incidentally, I also want my spouse to be happy, my children, my employees, even my friends and neighbors if I’m in a particularly generous mood. No wonder we’re miserable!  We’re fishing from dawn to dusk in a post-apocalyptic puddle.

In another post on this site, R U Happy? , we argued that ‘happy’ is always a relative term applicable to specific contexts: happy marriage, happy job, etc. There is no such thing as ‘being happy’ in an absolute, universal sense, at least not in the mortal realm. We are always just one insect bite away from abject misery…and that alone is enough to compromise any fleeting sense of satisfaction.

For example, imagine one of my Bucket List items is a visit to the Grand Canyon. Here I am at the iconic rim – breathtaking, and yes, I’m smiling. Good thing because I haven’t been smiling much over the past few days. There was the usual logistical stress getting here, compounded by a flight delay. Oh, and our ‘luxury accommodation’ turned out to be luxurious in price alone!

But I’m not complaining. I’m glad I got to see one of the world’s wonders. But was I happy then? Am I happy now?  Maybe, maybe not, but either way, can I give full credit (or blame) to the Grand Canyon?

“No, you don’t get it, the experience was fantastic. The hassles were a pin prick in comparison. I wouldn’t have sacrificed this experience for anything.”

Ok, great. But are you happy now? Happy that you saw it? Sure. Happy to cross another item off your list? Ok. But life is what fills the gaps between ‘Bucket Listers’ and the ultimate ‘Bucket Kicker’. How happy are you now?

There are a lot of things I do, perhaps not all bucket list worthy, that I enjoy. I’m happy while I’m doing them.

Dining on foie gras, sipping a vintage port, taking in a Giotto exhibit at the Met - I am ‘happy’ in the context of eating, drinking, and viewing, but I am not necessarily happy in the absolute.

I suppose my memories of these events are somewhat pleasant as well. But does any of this make me happy in an absolute sense? Wally Shawn captures this ethic perfectly in his iconic film, My Dinner with Andre:

“I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook, and I enjoy going through my list and carrying out the responsibilities and doing the errands and then crossing them off my list… I don’t feel the need for anything more than this… A delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake, why is it necessary to have more than this or to even think about having more than this?”

Shawn describes what it is like to be relatively happy in specific contexts. He argues that this is enough and, good thing too, because this is all there is!

In contrast, he describes Andre Gregory, his foil: “You seem constantly to be finding a significance in these things that to me are just facts…that things in the universe are there for a purpose, to give us messages. Whereas I believe that things in the universe are just there. They don’t mean anything.”

According to Shawn, Gregory is seeking absolute and meta-contextual happiness (gnosis, satisfaction), something that simply does not exist.  IRL, whenever I experience anything, I automatically notice imperfections and I immediately imagine how I might ‘improve the experience’. Next time, what would I do differently?

Rather than enjoying what is happening right now, I’m already thinking ahead. This is not the result of some character flaw; it’s human nature! It’s natural selection. When we do something pleasant, we seek ways to do it again, only better: “Next time… I’ll arrive earlier, dress more comfortably, bring a better bottle of wine.” Of course, that subverts the whole premise of a Bucket List: One and Done! And, of course, there is no next time.

No experience, no matter how extraordinary, is ever ‘perfect’. It can’t be, by nature! ‘Perfect moments’ (Sartre) are idealizations. In Euclid’s world, the angles of a perfect triangle always sum to exactly 180 degrees. IRL, not all triangles are ‘perfect’; in fact, none are! No three sided material object has angles that add precisely to 180.0000000… degrees.

There is an unbridgeable disconnect between the world of experience and the world of mathematics. Math deals only with ideal entities; IRL there are no such idealizations. Nothing is ever ideal. If it were, it would be Paradise.

Robert Frost gets it (The Road Not Taken):

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could…

Then took the other…

Oh I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back…

IRL there are no do-overs. Of course, you can try to correct your perceived mistakes but in the end it’s futile. For better or for worse, it’s one and done! The minute I say, to myself or others, “next time”, I’m guilty of bad faith. There are no ‘next times’, there are just those times and these times.

“Oh time, it’s like a river… ain’t nothin’ but a river.” (Grayson Hugh) And what do we know about rivers? You can’t step into the same one twice. (Heraclitus) So how do you want to live your life? Diagramming future events which, if realized IRL, will always differ significantly and unpredictably from their diagrams, events that will be perceived as ‘imperfect’ but that can never be ‘done over’. Or would you prefer to just live.

Re do-overs, of course you can go back to the Grand Canyon as often as you like, but each time you go, you’ll be going for the ‘first time’. The world consists entirely of ‘events’ – what else could it consist of? Anything else would just be scaffolding. Events happen when ideal objective values are applied to the imperfect material world.

For countless millennia, the vast majority of human beings have been engaged full time in the process of living, i.e. surviving and thriving. Only recently have technology and the market economy generated enough surplus wealth for ‘ordinary people’ to seek experience for its own sake, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself.

But that luxury conceals an even greater danger. We no longer only do what we have to do; now at least some of what we do can be what we want. So what do you want? Surprise: you want what I want, and I want what every human being wants: eternal and non-contextual bliss! What else is there?

As human beings, we all want the same thing, the only thing worth wanting. And yet no two human beings imagine the same path. That said, all of our imagined pathways have one thing in common: they are all doomed to fail.

There is no path to bliss! There is no ‘gateway experience’, not climbing Mount Everest, walking El Camino, visiting Arles, or walking on the Moon. These, and a hundred million alternative experiences, each has its own specific value, but none of these values includes eternal, non-contextual bliss.

 A ‘bucket list’ is a low budget version of the Taj Mahal. For all its splendor, it’s a tomb. Our buckets entomb us. They are the ‘things’ we trade life for. They are the idols we trade God for. So kick the bucket…over.

Recognize that every event is radically unique and enjoy it on its own terms, without the baggage of anticipation, nostalgia, or comparison. Now every event is a Bucket Lister! Because none is.

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