By Rania Dawud

From bucket lists to New Year’s resolutions, it seems like we’re always in need for a list to steer us towards a certain direction. To take it even farther, sometimes we make lists before the beginning of a school year or before a birthday. Any stage that can pass as a beginning could be marked by making those pesky lists.

And I can’t help but wonder if in making these lists we become more preoccupied with planning than we are with initiating? It’s good to have goals and aspirations, admirable even, but why wait until New Year’s to begin on your resolutions? 

How often do we really achieve what’s on those lists, anyway? Then we get disappointed and feel sorry for ourselves, wondering where we went wrong. And even though bucket lists, in particular, are not necessarily limited to a particular timeframe, it makes them even more stressful because having no deadline is somehow worse than having one.  

It’s more than fair to say that you don’t want to live with regrets but wouldn’t it be more likely that you will regret living according to a superficial list than by going with your gut and taking opportunities as they came?

The satisfaction of checking something off a list is unmatched but at the end of the day, we are not really our achievements. We fail, we put things off or we simply forget. That doesn’t diminish our value to those who love us, and it doesn’t take away from what makes us who we are. Life happens and not every goal will be met. 

Let’s say you checked everything off your Thirty Before Thirty list, you still have around forty more years of your life to fill, so now what? Another issue with these types of lists, as well, is that they imply an ending. They imply that once so and so is achieved, one can finally lie back and relax, when that’s never really the case.

Bucket lists tend to have outrageous activities or painfully practical end goals when life isn’t about either. It’s too messy and unpredictable to tie our worth to them, it’s better to live and let live, giving up the little control we have to fate.