In the same way that I’ve never really embraced the notion of guilty pleasures — if you like something then surely you like something, regardless how embarrassing it might be (and I say this as a huge fan of the 2009 film The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds) — so I’ve never really entertained the idea of the gap year or bucket list. The gap year seems to me to be yet another misguided millennial birthright, the idea that higher education was so stressful, and the prospect of full-time employment so daunting that the obvious recourse is to spend 12 months getting drunk in as many foreign places as possible. Mad.
Likewise, the bucket list. There are lots of things I’d still like to do in the world, but I don’t have a secret Word Doc full of places I want to visit, bridges I’d like to bungy jump from (short list), or esoteric or especially fat books I want to read. I also have no interest in running a marathon in Madagascar, doing a triathlon in Tasmania or skydiving in the Seychelles. The bucket list in my eyes has always been a spurious diversion given further oxygen by social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. And while I’m a massive fan of Instagram, I don’t see it primarily as a vehicle for showing everyone the paragliding I did in Austria (apart from that one time I went paragliding in Austria).
