Why You Should Make Bucket Lists

Clare Vogel

While scrolling through my mom’s Facebook, I found a photo of a summer bucket list I made in 2015 (thanks mom for sharing my entire adolescence online). On a sheet of lined paper, I made a bullet-pointed list with doodles depicting the activities alongside my ideas. 

Go swimming. Have a water balloon/gun fight. Grow a garden. Have a bonfire. Get ice cream. Go to Millennium Park. Celebrate the 4th of July. Go stargazing. Play volleyball. Play b-ball. Practice LAX. Read. Make popsicles.

In the last four years I have not once practiced lacrosse or planted anything in a garden. That being said, I have made a few summer bucket lists since, and there are a lot of commonalities. 

The summer after freshman year of high school I made one. 

Cliff jumping. Street fest. Beach/ledge. Water taxi from Chinatown. Day of thrift shopping. 606. Movie in the park. Museum. Skate park. All nighter. Sleepovers. Picnic. Midnight movies at Music Box. Party/rager/oc. Pool party. Roof. Sunrise/sunset. 

My summer before college. Another one.

Learn how to ride a bike with no hands. Go golfing. Tp someone’s house. Learn to do a headstand. Thrift store bins. Cabin trip. Fire pit night. Go camping. Go to Minion Ihop. Have the best (later changed to worst) 4th of July ever. Water taxi to/from downtown. Movie in the park. Go to beach/ledge.

Last summer. Another.

Bike. Beastie Boys rap. Special guest Penelope Peck. Go star gazing. Go camping. Square roots. Pull a prank. Cliff jump. Hammock. Karaoke. Group sleepover. Outdoor concert.

Even when life was beyond boring in quarantine, I found a way to make life exciting with a bucket list. 

Rube Goldberg machine. Camp in the backyard. Make a super rad composition book journal scrapbook. Eat an orange in the shower. All nighter. Write a letter for myself in a year. Star gazing. Sleep on the couch one night. Make a fort. Learn to make the perfect over-easy egg.

When years of my life are listed out like this, it’s hard to ignore the patterns. I’ll always want to go stargazing, swimming, or camping. Despite my lack of patriotism, my childhood love for the 4th of July is stubborn—even if 2022 was less than satisfactory. I consider myself thrifty to the highest degree which means (thrift shopping, of course, but also) free live music and movies in the park. 

I think these bucket lists stand as a testament to my ability to make life interesting. They also come in handy when yet another day of hanging out with my Chicago friends arises and we are sick of sitting in someone’s stuffy basement and feel unwilling to make the trek to the lake. 

Life is massively interesting if you make it so. I want to make my youth memorable and experience as much as possible. I realized this about myself and made a bucket list for my life at large.

Get punched in the face. Flip a table. Get tased. Ride in the middle seat of the front seat of a truck. Go cliff jumping. Learn to shotgun. Pants someone.

When my boyfriend and I first met and were chatting over text I sent the silly mental bucket list I had for myself. It goes hand in hand with the aforementioned list, but is far less achievable. If I do any of these things, my life will feel like an episode of Portlandia and I will get to say “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do!” 

Ghost write an autobiography. Learn to do the worm. Star in a workplace sexual assault training video.

He later said my texts about this bucket list made him realize he liked me and that we would get along quite well! I think he’s right because we have made our own bucket list of things we want to do together. Again, it helps keep dates interesting—if we ever run out of ideas for what to do, we know where to look. 

Aviary. Bowl at Pins. Extreme couponing at Giant Eagle. Smash cake into our faces in wedding getups. John Quinones What Would You Do: Noah says something evil at a restaurant and Clare throws water in his face. Star gaze (no bucket list is exempt from this). Facebook marketplace day. Glass blowing. Carnegie museum. Ikea. Photo booth. Walk around looking at houses. Cat cafe. Get crazy food and listen to our stomachs. Get scratchers. Phipps.

As someone who loves lists and could not survive without them, it does not come as a surprise that I would take any opportunity to bullet-point items. I also have a tendency to live in the future and motivate myself with what's to come. To be truthful, I didn’t realize I had made so many bucket lists until I started to write this, but as the dean from Community once said, “I guess we don't see our patterns until they're all laid out in front of us.” 

I'm glad I’ve made so many. Not only does it serve as a testament to how myself I truly am, but it also makes for an entertaining time-stamped diary to look back on.

I highly recommend everyone reading this to make a bucket list. Maybe it’s for 2024, the rest of this school year, the upcoming summer, or your entire life (maybe all four). I permit you to borrow some of my ideas, but I encourage you to make your own too. If you want to do something, write it down. Every time you are bored or want to remind yourself of things to look forward to, you can visit it. Then, when you do the thing, you get the highest form of pleasure by checking it off.

Edited by Lauren Deaton & Kate Castello