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Musings Report 2025-34 8-23-25 What's on Your "Reverse Bucket List"?
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What's on Your "Reverse Bucket List"?
A bucket list is an itemized list of goals--experiences or achievements--that we want to accomplish before we "kick the bucket"--i.e. die.
In the conventional realm, these tend to be travel or adventure goals--visit a famous place, climb a famous peak, etc. The idea here is we're "living our best lives" if we can check off all the items on our Bucket List / Wish List.
Our Bucket List expresses "who we are" in the form of aspirations that reflect our interests, character and dreams of what we might call a larger life than the one we live day-to-day.
There's another way of understanding "who we are," a process we might call The Reverse Bucket List, because it's the reverse of looking ahead--it looks back--and it's the reverse of an itemized list: it's a list of things we experienced that either expressed our goals at that specific point in our lives, or happened to us rather than being chosen by us.
In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Steve Jobs described how we cannot understand the connective threads of our lives without looking back--a sort of "rear view mirror" Bucket List that only reveals itself by studying our own past.
Here is how Jobs summarized it: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
The example from his own life was his spur-of-the-moment decision to attend a class in calligraphy at Reed College. It was not part of a grand plan or a Bucket List item; it was just another semi-random interest he pursued in these years (working in a apple orchard, etc.)
But this knowledge of calligraphy led to Jobs insisting the first Macintosh PC have a selection of fonts to choose from--a major change in a PC world where users got a typewriter-font and no other options. This built-in menu of fonts was an integral part of what became the desktop publishing revolution.
In other words, our Reverse Bucket List is an accounting of all the experiences that shaped "who we are" not because they were items on a "life plan" Bucket List but because their importance is only visible in looking back: we wouldn't be "who we are" now without these specific experiences.
This is how the Reverse Bucket List works.
1. The experiences are largely contingent / spontaneous rather than it-all-worked-as-planned. Things could have turned out completely differently with very small changes.
2. The experiences are not commoditized, meaning they're not experiences that are packaged such as travel tours. Others might have taken this trail or completed this task, but this specific experience was unique to us.
3. The experiences are not necessarily positive highlights; they might be negative experiences we survived.
4. The "dots" can only be connected looking back.
5. How the experiences shaped "who we are" is not always clear. We know the experience is important but can't distill it down to some causal chain--for example, "I did this and as a result I changed jobs." The experience shaped us in ways we can only sense rather than define.
Here are a few examples from my own life that illustrate the idea.
In early 1978, my spouse and I built a micro-house without power tools on a friend's plot of old sugar-cane plantation. We lived in a pup-tent without any water or power. There's a pile of lumber and plywood and a few foundation piers. You wake up, decide where to put the micro-house, and get to work with a shovel, handsaw, square, level, snapline, hammers, screwdriver, etc.
When you move into the plywood shack--oops, I mean micro-house--it's an incredible luxury.
I already had almost five years of construction experience by this time (from age 19 to 24), so I knew how to do the work, but this was my first experience building an entire structure on my own. As modest as it was, it was still there 30 years later.
Two years later, we built our own house, a conventional home in a conventional subdivision, this time with power and water. And four years after that, I was laying out a 43-unit subdivision my partner and I built as general contractors. Dot, dot, dot.
Building the micro-house with hand tools wasn't one of my planned life goals; things didn't go according to plan and this happened instead. But it was an important experience. It's definitely on my Reverse Bucket List: I wouldn't be "who I am" without it.
The same can be said of the experience of being a super-minority--being one of only a handful of "people who look like me" in a realm of people who don't look like us.
In 1968, we spent the summer in the Highland Park neighborhood of Detroit. It was an African-American community and the only other Caucasians we ever saw were our elderly immigrant landlords. When you're the only "different" folks around, you tend to be curiosities, and my brother and I had positive experiences. We walked to the local YMCA and ran the indoor track, and played pickup basketball with older guys.
A few years later, we moved to the island of Lanai in Hawaii, a pineapple plantation in that era. The only haoles (Caucasians) in the high school were myself and the principal's daughter, and for a time, the town doctor's daughter. My brother was the only haole in the elementary school. I was by default the only haole on the basketball team and on the local-students-only pineapple-picking crew I joined in summer.
History weighs heavily on these communities. We were not personally part of that history, but we experience the dot-connecting of history in our own lives.
Here's an example of an experience that made the Reverse Bucket List but not for being an experience everyone would love to have. It was a damp day, with light rain, and I needed to trim off a piece of the metal roof on a two-story house we were building an a sloping lot, so the roof edge was 2.5 stories off the ground. I had a heavy worm-drive Skilsaw and a power cord, and I tied a rope around my waist and secured it to something on the roof.
Safety first, right? I was 29 and had been doing this kind of work for 10 years.
The pre-painted steel roofing was damp and I was on the edge. I slipped in a split second, fell quite a distance in another split second, hit the rope which then snapped, breaking my fall. I ended up on the ground, in that peculiar state familiar to those of us who've experienced accidents of this sort. If you haven't been knocked out, you start moving limbs to see what still works, to assess how badly you're hurt.
Miraculously, I was sore but not broken. And the 13-pound Skilsaw missed me.
I was lucky. But in terms of the Reverse Bucket List, you start thinking about fate, destiny, and God's Will.
This experience--and other close calls involving tractors, vehicles and motorcycles--are on my Reverse Bucket List not just because I survived something that could have turned out worse. They're experiences of how injury and death are never as far away as we might imagine. They're always close by.
In another accident some years later, when a ladder slipped, I fell and was knocked out. I woke up. Not everyone does. Who survives and who dies in such circumstances boils down to small things--a few inches difference and your head would have hit a steel foundation anchor, or a concrete footing, and you might not wake up.
Nobody puts "almost get killed in a stupid accident" or "have a Near-Death Experience" on their Bucket List. Even if someone did have this on their list, the problem is engineering a spontaneous accident so you survive isn't possible.
"Who we are" doesn't distill down to a checklist, but it's certainly true that we would be different if we hadn't experienced all the things on our Reverse Bucket List. And if we find great value in all our life experiences, then we may treasure our Reverse Bucket List far more than our looking-ahead wish-list Bucket List.
If you're of a mind to, it's interesting to ask yourself: what's on my Reverse Bucket List? What experiences am I glad I had, even if they weren't conventional highlights?
Highlights of the Blog
How Great Powers Fall Apart 8/21/25
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A three-day visit with my sister. Our siblings are the only ones who experienced our childhood and youth with us, and so it's always wonderful to spend time just talking about anything and everything.
Just before dusk a full rainbow appeared, and the "pano" (panorama) setting on the iPhone enabled this photo.
What's on the Book Shelf
The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal. At a reader's suggestion, I'm identifying links that are free/not paywalled.
Ford workers told their CEO ‘none of the young people want to work here.’ So Jim Farley took a page out of the founder’s playbook. (free)
"And They Wonder Why The Birth Rate Is Declining": A Mother Went Viral For Revealing The Costs Of Being Pregnant In America. (free)
How gen Z is rewriting money rules: ‘I thrift, I splurge, I save 25%’ (paywalled)
People Who Escaped Poverty Are Spilling The Hard Truths That Rich People Will Literally Never Understand (free)
There's A Lot of Honest Pain Out There (free)
Hearts of Darkness: A Film-Maker's Apocalypse review – Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of all meltdowns (paywalled) -- a documentary worth watching ...
How much (little) are the AI companies making? (free)
After 41 years in captivity, this sea turtle is finally swimming home (free)
Quentin Tarantino on Steve McQueen's Bullitt (1968 film)(20 min) (free)
‘Will AI take my job?’ A trip to a Beijing fortune-telling bar to see what lies ahead. (paywalled)
Thanks to Zillow, Your Friends Know How Much Your House Costs—or if You’re Secretly Rich. (paywalled)
Tom Murphy Stubborn Expectations (on population trends) (free)
The Collapse of Everyday Life in America Has Begun (15:09 min) (via Doug W.)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." (Voltaire)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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