Bucket lists

Life is meaningless. Therefore it seems fitting to create your own, similarly meaningless goals to spend your time with whilst you remain alive.

Everyone has goals; often to become rich, famous, beautiful, (insert adjective), etc. These aren't as much goals, but directions however. There's no point at which someone can with certainty be called famous, have enough money to be rich - at least to themselves. The grass will always appear greener, and with these kinds of abstract goals one can spend their whole life unsatisfied, searching for unattainable perfection. While this has the same amount of point as anything else, and can lead to entrancing results, they are pointless on a bucket list. How can you keep track of something so abstract? Even if you say you've accomplished one of these goals, they will always leave you in question of their true fulfillment. Therefore they should be exiled from the fertile land of the napkin you scribbled your bucket list on.

Your bucket list should only contain quantifiable, easy to understand (to you at least) goals. They don't have to be achievable, but I recommend keeping improbable things like "become dictator of Turkey" off the list.

I still haven't said why you should consider having a bucket list however, so here it goes. Counting. I just love watching numbers go up. That little hit of dopamine when another box ticks up, another goal completed, another moment recorded. As Camus said, "what counts is not the best living but the most living". What could be more enjoyable but quantifying how much you've lived? While this shouldn't tunnel-vision you into ignoring the rest of your experiences, having a bucket list is a nice way to keep track of them.

If you've decided you also would like your own little list of meaningless meaning, join the cult and start throwing together all your mismatch desires as well. If you can't think of anything to write, then don't feel pressured to add things you don't really care about doing (and please don't just copy one of those crappy pre-made bucket lists you can find online they can be good sources of inspiration though), just wait, and anytime you think "I wish", "I want", "I should" just jot it to the list. Your bucket list shouldn't be a fixed thing, it should be a growing organism, constantly expanding and becoming harder to keep track of. In just a bit of time, you'll have more goals than you'll know what to do with.

Now when you find yourself in a lull in life, just take a glance at your list and boom - weekend plans acquired.

To finish off my word vomit, feel free to examine and judge my current bucket list. Some people have pointed out the overall lack of pointed-ness of it, but as Melon says: "unnecessary things are the spice of existence". Enjoy :)

Visit Saipan
Own a vending machine
Get on the news
Climb any mountain
Sleep in a cave
Drink a glass of rain water
Each a cockroach
Wear a maid outfit
See a David Lynch film in a theater
Have a kid
Donate blood
Read no longer human in Japanese
Sleep in the snow
Milk a goat
Graduate college
Visit Yosemite
Kiss someone in the rain
Grow potatoes
Do 100 pushups in a row
Verify Lain bot
Plant a tree
Protest
Eat my passport
Stay up for 72 hours
Split myself in two in a dream
Gamble in a casino
My lawyer advised me against including this one
Make cheese
Make a house of cards
Use a hair straightener
Write a poem
Go fishing
Visit the RR diner
See a live octopus
Start a fire with sticks
Shoot a gun
Grab a bird
Pet a fox
Kiss someone's hand
Make major arcana
Get bills from 10 different currencies
En passant
Read entire Bible
Grow a long beard
Beat S—— in wordhunt
Pass an AP test
Believe
Death posture
Bake bread
Remake creation of Adam
Beat egg inc
Get a Wikipedia page
Join Lain webring
Try to summon something
Go spelunking
Learn toki pona
Do 11 point turn
Explore utility tunnels
Make a compiler
Have a yearlong Duolingo streak
Scale a wire fence
Coffee and cigarettes
Be stabbed
Play the Campaign for North Africa
Hold a million dollars
Get emailed by 100 colleges
Get a fake glowing window
Have someone pee on my grave
Drink holy coffee
Watch radioactive decay
Drift
Burn a flag
Drink D2O
Make a sapphire (ideally red)
Construct a language for birds
Meet my doppelgänger
Publish a book
Befriend a crow
Switch to Windows 95
Visit the bass pro shop pyramid
Enter a tabernacle

Oh, you thought that was the end, did you? Well it was, at one point, but I now would like to clarify on something that's been tossing in my mind for a while now: editing goals.

Does it make sense to change (or remove) goals you've set for yourself in the past? Each goal was something that at one point I sought for and hoped to reach one day; even if I no longer value it - should I betray my past self's decision? Yes. That me is dead, and it's not up for the current me to waste precious grains of falling sand doing what the late I once thought worthy of doing. The past is irrelevant, you live now - do as thou wilt.