Your bucket list is allowed to change its mind
You are not obliged to spend the next 20 years pursuing an idea just because a younger version of you once wrote it down.
It would be odd to let a younger version of yourself choose your current haircut, holidays and friends. Yet plenty of us allow that person to maintain permanent control over the bucket list. Some of their ideas will still be excellent. Others will have been borrowed from a documentary, added during a brief enthusiasm for endurance sport or chosen because they sounded like the sort of thing an interesting person ought to want. A bucket list starts as a useful collection of things you would like to do. It catches ideas before they disappear: places to visit, skills to learn, challenges to attempt and experiences that seem too good to leave to chance. Then, once something has been written down, it acquires a strange authority and can spend the next decade sitting there looking mildly disappointed in you. You are allowed to change your mind. Wanting to have done something is not the same as wanting to do it Some ambitions look wonderful from the far side. You picture yourself at the marathon finish, speaking fluent Italian or returning from six months travelling with an impressive collection of photographs. You spend less time picturing the wet training runs, irregular verbs or the afternoon spent arguing with an overseas ticket machine. That does not automatically make the goal wrong. Anything difficult will occasionally seem less appealing when it requires you to get out of bed and do the difficult bit. The more useful question is whether you want the experience itself or merely like the idea of being somebody who has completed it. If nobody else would ever know, would you still want to do it? Another decent test is to imagine discovering the idea today. Would you immediately add it to your list, or would you wonder which ambitious stranger had been editing your account? If the desire is still there, keep it. If only the impressive ending remains, it may be time for a rethink. The idea might need changing rather than deleting Sometimes the answer is still yes, but the original version no longer fits your life. The month-long journey might become a week. The marathon might become a 10K. The enormous overseas adventure might turn into something closer to home that offers the part you actually cared about: solitude, wildlife, physical challenge or simply being somewhere you cannot see your usual supermarket. That is not automatically the consolation-prize version. Circumstances change. Bodies change, budgets change and the amount of spare time available can collapse without consulting anybody first. You are allowed to negotiate with your own ambition. A paper map still leaves room to change the route. Photo: Kyle Loftus on Unsplash . Psychologists have the considerably less dramatic term “goal adjustment” for some of this. A review of research into changing unattainable goals found that being able to disengage from one goal and re-engage elsewhere had distinct links with quality of life. The research is broader than bucket lists, but the useful point survives: changing direction can be an adaptive response rather than an admission of defeat. It does not mean throwing away everything that becomes inconvenient. It means recognising when persistence is serving the goal and when it is merely serving an old decision. Do not mistake one bad week for a change of heart There is a difference between no longer wanting something and not wanting to work on it this afternoon. One horrible training run does not require a complete review of your identity. Neither does an expensive quote, a rejected application or discovering that learning the guitar involves quite a long period of sounding terrible. Ask what is creating the resistance. Fear, effort, money, accessibility and a difficult stage of life may mean the plan needs help, a different scale or more time. Genuine indifference is different. If you keep moving an activity into an imaginary future because you cannot bear to admit that you no longer care about it, the list is not motivating you. It is storing guilt. Parking something can be honest. Removing it can be honest too. Nobody from the International Bucket List Authority is going to inspect your paperwork. Changing direction does not make the original route a mistake. Photo: Clint Patterson on Unsplash . Nor does removing an idea ban it forever. You can add it again later if life changes or the enthusiasm returns. It will probably be more useful then because you will have chosen it twice. Give the oldest item five minutes Open your My 42 List and choose one of the oldest things on it. Not the most exciting item or the easiest win; choose the one that has quietly survived several years without getting any closer. Would you add it today? Do you want the actual experience, including the inconvenient parts, or mainly the finished story? Is the obstacle something that needs solving, or is the truth that you would rather spend your time doing something else? Keep it, reshape it, leave it for later or remove it. The important thing is to make a decision deliberately instead of allowing the item to become permanent simply because deleting it feels suspiciously like failure. A bucket list should make life feel larger, not leave you reporting to a committee chaired by your younger self. Keep the ideas that still pull you forward and let the stale ones go. The list works for you. It does not get a vote. Header photograph: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash .