Eat, pray, #fuckoff

11/01/2025

The term “bucket list” (in the sense of “things one wants to do before one dies”) is credited to screenwriter Justin Zackham.

Zackham created his own “List of Things to Do Before I Kick the Bucket” in 1999, then shortened it to “Justin’s Bucket List”.

His screenplay later became the film The Bucket List (2007). The phrase then entered popular use via that film.

Sources note that documented uses of “bucket list” before 2006 are  likely to be errors. For example Google’s ngram reports a few cases of it’s use around 1900.

But manually searching the records doesn’t find any of these. It’s probably OCR errors or text misreads in scanned books. For example, an old printing of “bucket: list of items” could be read by Google’s software as “bucket list.”

It’s one of those fake-folksy expressions that pretends to be exclusive while actually being a shallow as all social media. It’s as cringeworthy as cray-cray, relos and mazeballs.

It’s got that forced intimacy that people use when they want to sound real but are really just parroting a vibe.

#peopleposingoncliff edges. It’s the verbal equivalent of those “Live, Laugh, Love” decals.

And yeah, I don’t like it.