9 Signs Your Bucket List Has Evolved into a Death Tour

Right around the time I fully got the memo that 50 was right around the corner, my brain started thinking about life from an angle that would have sounded excessively morbid at 27. I'm not really talking about health concerns or financial calculations, although those things are pretty much perpetually on my mind at this point.

I’m talking about time calculations. For example, “How many times can I realistically reread this book series before I'm compost?”

I've started informally thinking of this inventory-taking as my Death Tour™. A Death Tour resembles a bucket list in the same way the shitty little squirrel that keeps raiding my garden resembles a burglar. Similar concept, entirely different energy.

I guess I get stuck on the idea that traditional bucket lists usually involve huge, existential experiences people imagine will transform them or help them discover the secret to life. You know – climb Everest, visit Paris, jump out of an airplane, eat soup in a country where the soup arrives complete with a really tiny spoon.

I've never been much of a "go be adventurous and experience the world" person, though, so I don't truly care about those experiences. I'm more of an indoor cat, so my Death Tour list involves things like:

• Finally reading the Outlander series
• Possibly rereading the Outlander series at some future point
• Learning Icelandic, because having familiarized myself with 20 languages just doesn't feel like enough
• Rewatching favorite television series one more time, during a rainstorm when possible
• Maybe developing a working understanding of quantum physics before the universe formally returns me to the earth

Puruits that involve the sorts of things that are important to me, because I've never at any point wanted to jump out of an airplane. Plus, the older you get, the stranger and more intimate the list becomes.

Certain experiences start feeling less like entertainment and more like relationships you’d still like time to have. I also think a lot of people enter their Death Tour era without necessarily calling it that, but more on that in a second.

1. You start calculating whether a long book series is worth it

As a young person, I was definitely the type to casually start a 14-book fantasy series without a second thought, especially if I knew I had a nice, long summer ahead of me or something.

At 50, I'm doing math, though. Existential math.

You start wondering things like:

• “How many major reading experiences do I realistically have left?”
• “How many giant immersive worlds can I still fully inhabit during that time?”
• “If I begin this now, will I finish before civilization finally gives up and collapses?”

Reread potential naturally also enters the equation.

To me, reading something once almost never feels like enough for certain books. You also crave time to revisit them and to encounter them as different versions of yourself. Young people consume stories, but middle-aged people increasingly want to live alongside them.

2. "It gets good in Season 3" has no place in a good recommendation

These days, a television show gets approximately four episodes to convince me it deserves to occupy a portion of my remaining earthly lifespan. Maybe six if the cinematography looks expensive or the show in question is just the stuff of legend.

Beyond that, absolutely not.

Time stopped feeling like a Costco-sized resource a long time ago, so I’ve started evaluating television the same way medieval kings used to evaluate military campaigns. “Will this investment produce meaningful returns?”

Every terrible prestige drama now carries an invisible opportunity cost. I could spend those hours watching something I genuinely love, rereading a favorite novel, or sitting in the garden staring at birds while drinking coffee for the millionth time.

3. You realize there are probably only so many major obsessions left

One day, you eventually come to understand that life does not contain infinite “eras.” There will only ever be but so many:

• Books that completely rearrange your interior world
• Films that alter your personality for six months
• Hobbies that consume your entire imagination
• Songs capable of emotionally annihilating you in the produce aisle

You still discover new things, obviously, and you don’t necessarily start yelling at kids to get off your lawn right when you turn 50 or anything. But it's still different past that point.

Deep obsessions require energy and openness, and your inner world already contains decades of memories, references, weird fixations, favorite candles, comfort movies, and emotionally significant weather patterns. New things need room now.

4. Your bucket list gets smaller and weirder

Traditional bucket lists say things like, “Visit Antarctica.” Death Tour lists say things like, “Finally organize my bookshelves correctly.” And the second one feels weirdly more important now.

Smaller desires start carrying surprising emotional weight. I know I want:

• Another autumn rereading old classics
• Enough summers left to grow multiple tomato varieties
• Time to learn another very obscure language "just because"
• As many peaceful evenings watching beloved comfort shows as possible
• A home that finally feels fully mine, weird occult workspace and all

Death Tours don't shrink your world so much as concentrate it in interesting ways.

5. You stop consuming things just because you should

Somewhere after entering middle age, I officially stopped seeing pursuits like... say... media consumption as long-term group projects.

As a result, I also stopped forcing myself through books I had zero real interest in simply because they’re culturally important. I'm comfortable walking away from television shows everyone else insists are masterpieces, too. (Succession, I'm looking at you.)

Entire categories of obligation entertainment suddenly lose their power over you. So, by all means. If you've never read War and Peace all the way through and have zero desire to, don't fucking read it.

6. You crave rereads over endless novelty

Younger versions of ourselves often chase constant discovery. Think new books, blockbuster films, the latest music. New everything. Then one day, we realize we’re more excited to revisit something familiar instead.

Because I know I will have changed between visits.

Howards End might be the same book it's always been. But in between readings, I accumulate years of grief, joy, awkwardness, survival, memories, and social opinions that would have bored my younger self to tears.

Some stories deserve decades to give them that chance to hit differently. Preferably multiple times.

7. You become very protective of your attention

The older I get, the more my attention feels like a literal physical resource. One really draining interaction can ruin an entire afternoon now, so meaningless noise (especially online) just isn't my bag anymore.

And on the flip side, experiences no longer have to be bucket-list big to matter.

These days, I'll take a free evening reading during a storm over a wild YOLO-style vacation with friends I don't have (or want) any day. And rearranging my office while listening to music starts sounding like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a birthday or a long weekend.

Death Tours make prioritization feel necessary. Plus, being older has a way of asking you why you keep handing your focus to every algorithm, obligation, and random person demanding access to you.

Like, I have a limited number of Memorial Day weekends left. I have zero desire to waste part of one of them chatting with some random bored person named Chad on Facebook, just to avoid looking rude.

8. Mortality awareness really improves your taste

Once you realize your time in this life really is finite, your preferences get pretty refined. For instance, I definitely know by now:

• Which movies deserve rewatches
• Which friendships are actually worth my time
• Which of my many hobbies has staying power
• Which experiences create actual memories

A surprising amount of modern life depends on people continuing to think and behave as if their time has no value, but the Death Tour destroys that illusion beautifully.

9. You suspect everyone is on their own secret Death Tour

As I've aged, I've developed a deep understanding of why we as humans become increasingly aware of people like:

• The woman learning watercolor painting at 62
• The aging couple rewatching the same old television series every autumn
• The friend suddenly obsessed with gardening
• The person finally learning piano after talking about it for 30 years

People who make decisions like those aren't being as random as it might seem. They've simply stopped putting things off in expectation of a hypothetical future that may not ever happen.

So, I get that the idea of a Death Tour sounds morbid at first, like something that involves a glamorous vampire boarding a train in 1978. But I personally find it comforting. It’s about no longer treating my days like disposable filler and starting to treat them like something precious and finite instead.

I stopped asking, “What do I want to do someday?” Instead, I started asking, “What still deserves a place inside the remaining years of my one weird, specific, beautiful life?”