Uplift Blog: The bucket list

Even among those that lack a physical bucket list, it seems people are more likely to regret all the things they haven’t done more so than what they did. Maybe the only thing worse than having nowhere to go is having no one to wish you well at the start of the journey. It’s as if everyone with the best of intentions feels obligated to give their own opinions to those bitten by the travel bug; “Don’t you care about everyone you know back home?”, “Do you really want to go somewhere you can’t even speak the language?”, “But that’s how girls get trafficked!”.

If there is one aspect of society in which millennials are pushing the envelope, it is definitely resetting life’s timeline. There was so much pressure before to finish college in four years, be married with kids and a skyrocketing mortgage by a certain age, to find the dream job and work there until retirement. Millenials want to see the world, pursue their own passions, start a business and oftentimes, it seems, live by their own set of rules.

Any expat will tell anyone who will listen that culture shock, language barriers and simply incompatibility with a new environment have been as commonplace as learning from, experiencing and adapting to a new way of life. Speaking from experience, there are times when everyone has cried from frustration and homesickness, thrown a jumbled mess of their belongings into their beat up suitcases and Google searched the next flight home. In the end, you are just as likely to do this when you move into your college dorm room at eighteen as you are when your company transfers you to Morocco to close a business deal at fifty.

Some people want to see all 196 countries before they reach a certain most people would expect to be married with kids by. No one is truly right or wrong in the classic “should I stay or should I go?” dilemma. There’s so much to see and to experience in the world. Some people have a comfort zone much larger than a single square foot of the familiar and it is the means of adapting (oftentimes, taught by travel experiences) that teaches us more than what it means to survive, but how to truly live.

As pessimistic as the saying may sound, it is, unfortunately, true that while everyone dies, not everyone truly lives. Human beings are capable of doing much more than paying bills and complaining about our jobs. With almost 200 countries, thousands of languages, cultures, and religions, and countless opportunities, travelers are the ones that truly learn to be in the world and of the world and not simply sit back and watch as life passes by them. No one truly knows how much time they have left in the world.