The case against the bucket list
Checklists make efficient trips and forgettable ones. What happens when you plan for depth instead of coverage.
A bucket list is a coverage strategy. It optimises for the number of named things seen per day, which is a metric nobody actually cares about a year later.
The trips people describe to us as the best of their lives are almost always the ones with fewer than one fixed activity per day. Not because doing less is virtuous, but because slack is where the good accidents happen.
“The permit buys you a morning. Everything else you do buys you the odds that the morning is the one you'll talk about for ten years.”
Our rule of thumb: three anchors a week. Everything else is optional, and the traveller decides that morning, over breakfast, based on the weather and their mood.
This is harder to sell than a nine-city itinerary. It is much easier to remember.
Writes for The Passage about the parts of a trip that don't fit in a brochure. Available to design yours.