MMy friend Diego is a tour guide for a cruise line that specializes in bucket list tours to the Galapagos Islands, and he was moaning. “I see 400 new faces every week,” he said. “These are lovely people who have been planning their retirement trip to the islands for decades. They’ve bought the outfits, read the books, seen the Attenborough documentaries, and when they first step ashore and see the iguanas, blue-footed boobies and sea lions, do you know what the first question they ask is?” he fumed. “Where’s the bathroom?”
That’s the tragedy of the bucket list. You spend your best years following the rules – buying a house, paying taxes, raising children, taking the 33.9 days of annual leave that the average drone is entitled to – and once you’ve earned your freedom, you’ll need a spoon on your list because the days of being able to climb a volcano without having to pee three times are long gone.
Last month, when 5,000 wildebeest plunged into the Mara River in East Africa during their migration, I saw two gentlemen of a certain age, fast asleep in their safari vehicles, literally living their dream. In June, my friend Anna shared how she had explored Venice alone – as far as one can be alone in Venice – because her parents had decided to stay on board the cruise ship and do the crossword puzzle, and I can’t count the number of times my mother has ended a trip report with the words, “And your father decided to wait in the car.”
Don’t wait until retirement to see the world’s most beautiful sights
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Far be it from me to deconstruct the hugely successful capitalist work model, but it seems that waiting until retirement to explore the world isn’t always such a great idea. I’ve heard that 80 is the new 60 and that the world is a wave to be surfed by the silver surfers, but why should we put off adventure when we don’t know how much time we have for it?
The travel industry claims that’s exactly what we want to do: tick off the must-see sights on our bucket list, either alone (expensive) or in the company of like-minded party animals of the same age (slightly cheaper).
The impossible ideal would be to enjoy retirement young and fit, to spend mid-life paying off your pension and the rest of your life making memories and enjoying a good cup of tea on the veranda.
The Bucket List, based on the 2007 film of the same name in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two terminally ill old geezers in search of fulfillment, is nothing more than a tourism marketing ploy designed to make us feel that our lives would somehow be poorer if we didn’t see Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, Uluru or the Grand Canal. But since overtourism has overwhelmed the 1,000 places you must see before you die, wouldn’t we be richer if we stayed away?
Many of us, it seems, already do. New research from luxury travel association Virtuoso suggests the bucket list may already be dying. At a press conference in Las Vegas last week, its vice president Misty Belles revealed that Virtuoso’s super-rich clientele now prefer the spontaneity of the shit list (immediately going somewhere you’ve never been before) to the bucket list (following the herd and going for the predictable). And as travel agents know, what the rich do now is what the rest of us will be doing in three years.
But why wait until then? None of us are getting any younger.
Do you think it’s time to say goodbye to the bucket list? Let us know in the comments
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