For the same reasons that New Year’s resolutions are daft, it’s time to ditch the bucket list. Columnist Steven Thrasher rightly argues that your actions to get something done or try something new should be driven by your gusto for life — passion, curiosity, wonder, joy — rather than dictated by a check box because you’re one step closer to death. Signs that it’s time to ditch the bucket list: when the idea is co-opted by corporations, advertisers and Hollywood; when motivational posters appear in hallways; and when physical bucket list buckets and notepads go on sale at Pottery Barn or Walmart.

From the Guardian:

Before each one of us dies, let’s wipe the “bucket list” from our collective vocabulary.

I hate the term “the bucket list.” The phrase, a list of things one wants to do in life before one dies or “kicks the bucket”, is the kind of hackneyed, cliche, stupid and insipid term only we Americans can come up with.

Even worse, “the bucket list” has become an excuse for people to couch things they actually desire to try doing as only socially acceptable if framed in the face of their death. It’s as if pleasure, curiosity and fun weren’t reasons enough for action.

If you want to try doing something others might find strange or unorthodox – write a novel, learn to tap dance, engage in a rim job, field dress a deer, climb Everest, go out in drag for a night – why do you need any justification at all? And certainly, why would you need an explanation that is only justifiable in terms of kicking the bucket?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the phrase “bucket list” comes to us from the banal mind of screenwriter Justin Zackham, who developed a list of things he wanted to do before he died. Years later, his “bucket list” became the title of his corny 2007 film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. It’s about two old men with terminal cancer who want to live it up before they die. That, if anyone at all, is who should be using the term “bucket list”. They want to do something with the finite time they know they have left? Fine.

But bucket list has trickled down to everday use by the perfectly healthy, the exceptionally young, and most of all, to douche bags. I realized this at Burning Man last week. Often, when I asked exceptionally boring people what had drawn them to Black Rock City, they’d say: “It was on my bucket list!”

Really? You wanted to schlep out to the desert and face freezing lows, scorching highs and soul crushing techno simply because you’re going to die someday?

There’s a funny dynamic sometimes when I go on a long trip while I’m out of work. When I backpacked through Asia and Europe in 2013, people (usually friends chained to a spouse, children and a mortgage) would sometimes awkwardly say to me: “Well, it will be the trip of a lifetime!” It was a good trip, but just one of many great journeys I’ve taken in my life so far. My adventures might interrupt someone else’s idea of what’s “normal.” But travel isn’t something I do to fulfil my “bucket list”; travel is a way of life for me. I do not rush into a trip thinking: “Good Christ, I could die tomorrow!” I don’t travel in place of the stable job or partner or kids I may or may not ever have. I do it as often as I can because it brings me joy.

Read the entire column here.