Why the experiences you think you want feel like someone else’s
He started the list after turning fifty. A safari. The pyramids. Swimming with dolphins. The Northern Lights. Then he found a list online called 100 Experiences You Must Have Before You Die and kept adding things.
It was only later that he noticed what he was doing. He was spending hours thinking about the experiences he wanted to have without actually thinking about what he wanted to experience.
The safari came from a magazine. The dolphins came from a television programme. The Northern Lights came from photographs. The Camino came from a friend. His bucket list was beginning to look less like a collection of his dreams and more like a collection of things he had been told were worth doing.
We can spend years this way. Building ambitions from other people’s adventures. The internet is full of lists telling us what to do before it is too late, and we absorb them without questioning whether we actually want any of it. Popular experiences begin to feel like obligations. We mistake someone else’s photograph for our own desire.
One Saturday morning he made himself a coffee, put his phone in another room and sat at the kitchen table with a pad of paper. No browser. No list. Just silence.
That alone was surprisingly difficult.
Eventually he wrote something down.
A day by the sea with no plans.
It seemed embarrassingly ordinary compared with the safari. Then he wrote another. A long lunch with his brother. A few days somewhere warm where he could walk slowly, drink coffee and read. A proper holiday with his wife where neither of them had to rush.
None of these appeared on the lists he had been reading. No photographs that would make strangers jealous. But something about them felt different.
They felt like him.
He thought about the things he had actually enjoyed. The Sunday he and his daughter had driven into the countryside with no destination. The afternoon under a tree with a book. The small restaurant they had discovered by accident years ago. None of it had been on a bucket list. He had just enjoyed being there.
By lunchtime he had filled several pages. He had not planned anything or booked anything. But for the first time in a long while, he felt he had discovered something.
He had been looking for experiences everywhere except inside himself.
What have we been collecting that we do not actually want?
Some of what we find online will genuinely inspire us. But some of it is just noise. A life built from other people’s lists does not feel like relief when it finally happens. It feels like ticking boxes.
The question is not what should be on the list. The question is whether the list is even yours.
What comes up when no one is telling you what to want?
What did you enjoy before you started keeping lists?
If you could have one unremarkable day exactly as you wanted it, what would it look like?