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A bucket list for the non-achiever

<p>Without further ado, I offer you the bucket list for the non-achiever!</p>

Without further ado, I offer you the bucket list for the non-achiever!

'I’ve always had trouble with the notion of the traditional “bucket list.” First of all, I don’t particularly like buckets. They always seem to be filled with some substance with which I’d rather not come into contact. Then there’s the problem with lists, which are simply forums that allow me to wallow in my own inefficacy and complete lack of drive. I don't know about you, but I’d rather my wasted and insignificant life remain unrecognized in tangible form. 

But what, truly, is a “waste”? Everything, it seems. I mean, after denying his own mortality for the whole of the hour and thirty-seven minute movie “The Bucket List,” Morgan Freeman’s character dies anyway. You’d think after doing all those epic things he’d have to turn immortal or something. But nope — he is returned to the same elements of the earth of which he was born out not even a fraction of a cosmic second before. 

I don’t take this rejection of imminent destruction lightly. Accordingly, for all the people who wish not to submit to society’s demand that you must do something worthwhile with your silly life, I’ve created the perfect anti-bucket list for all your monotonous, quietly-fade-into-oblivion needs. There are no numbers in my list because I am decidedly against math’s vain attempt to derive any structure from the chaotic abyss of suffering that is existence. Without further ado, I offer you the bucket list for the non-achiever!

  • Join any and every contest you can, always aiming to achieve runner up. First is the worst!
  • Read every single Terms and Conditions page that you come across — or better yet, seek them out! — always exiting out before clicking the “I accept” button.
  • Write letters to the editor in response to every article you read but never send them, letting them pile up on your desk.
  • In a workplace that wants its employees to look respectable, make everyday casual Friday because you are just too hungover to care.
  • Only donate to charity when bake sales are involved. In a similar vein, treat others the way you would be treated if you were rich — leech off of them.
  • When pursuing a lifelong career, never exert more energy than will make you look cool. Only accept assistant positions, never climbing to the top. Or even better, enter a field that you are not passionate about in the slightest, simply because you are too insecure or lazy to put in the work to excel. 
  • Spend your life searching for your soulmate, fail to find them by the time you’re 35, and settle for John from accounting who you’ve used for free dinners and movies on occasion. Now use him once more to bring your ugly rugrats  — who look exactly like him, by the way — into the world.
  • Get a ticket to see one of your favorite bands but decide on the night of the show that you’re too tired and give it away to some acquaintance on Facebook who suddenly comments on one of your posts for the first time in five years.
  • Buy a plane ticket to go to some exotic place for Christmas but be unable to go because you’re snowed in.
  • Go on a diet but allow yourself a cheat day every week for some new, nonsense reason like “I spent the day with my in-laws yesterday. I deserve a treat.” 
  • Have an idea for an amazing company, spend years of your life and loads of money investing in it, then realize that Uber already exists.
  • Make decisions based solely in revenge. Holding grudges is no fun unless you act on them.
  • Do the “plank” — 2011 meme — for an extended period of time in your house while you’re alone. Not for the internet — just because your life is so exhaustingly boring that you need a break.

These are only some examples of ways to waste your days away in style. If you buy into the viewpoint that life means nothing — which allows you to remain in an endless cycle of self-destruction and feel better about disappointing the people who know your true worth — follow my lead! Achieve something that actually matters by sending a statement to all those elitist go-getters of the world with this bucket list for the non-achiever. 

Erin Clancy is a Humor Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at humor@cavalierdaily.com.

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