So then, I was reading the Sunday Comics, and there was something about a Bucket List. A Bucket List is basically a list of what you want to do before you die.

Sounds pretty normal, eh? Yes, but I was doing some spontaneous thinking, and I realised that bucket lists presented potential logical paradoxes.

You would agree, that we all have a finite amount of time to live. Thus, you would also agree that our lists have to be finite. If our lists are finite, it is only logical to list down the things which we most want to do. The ones which we, well, put at the tops of our lists.

Now, assuming that we have chosen activities wisely such that we can accomplish all of them within our lifetime, we essentially have a good list. But, how long these activities take is but only one factor. One must also take into account the nature of these activities, and most importantly, whether or not they will affect the nature of the other activities.

By that, I mean whether or not we get killed/crippled while doing one activity, thus stopping us from completing the rest of them.

Take bungee jumping for example. It is not uncommon to see “bungee jump the Grand Canyon” on people's bucket lists. After all, it is exciting and is considered a fulfilling experience by many. A person with bungee jumping on his bucket list must take into account the risk factor of this human slingshot. It is safe to say that there is a chance of the person getting seriously injured, or dying, due to some unforseen mishap. Even though these crazy activities are getting safer(somewhat...), there is still that little risk factor there.

There are other dangerous activities that people would like to do before they die. Swimming with sharks, hang-gliding over the Pacific, staring down the barrel of a shotgun...

Given how easy it is for someone to die when bullet fragments explode through his brain, it would be logical to place the more dangerous activities further down the timescale, thus allowing you to achieve more of your bucket list activities. Basically, put the less dangerous ones sooner, more dangerous ones later.

However, many of the more dangerous bucket list activities are also highly physical. This means that they would be more easily performed by someone who is healthy and fit. Also assuming that none of us have Claire Bennet's regeneration abilities, we will all get old, weak, and fragile.

Now, I'm going to make a generalisation here and say that the older you are, the more fragile you are, and therefore the higher the chance of you biting the bullet while doing a dangerous activity. We can try to explain this mathematically. The probability of you dying whilst attempting a dangerous activity is a product of your fragility and the level of danger of this activity.

This basically works out to... Uh... The older you are, the more likely you'll die while bungee jumping.

So, if we consider bungee jumping a dangerous activity, in contrast to something like... Shaking hands with your favourite celebrity as a non-dangerous activity(I know, bad example), and we follow the first rule of putting dangerous things last, we would find that by the time we have completed the non-dangerous activities, we would be so old that our risk of dying would have increased substantially when we attempt the later activities.

This could mean a few things. One, when we attempt our later, more dangerous activities, we would have an extremely large chance of kicking the bucket right there. Assuming that our lists consist of dangerous, not so dangerous, and petting-zoo-with-stuffed-animals dangerous activities in equal proportions, we would essentially be almost guaranteed to complete all the low to mid level of danger activities. We're assuming that the hyper-dangerous ones are in a comparatively small proportion. Because people with entire bucket lists filled with “Swim with Great White without shark cage, Explore belly of live killer whale, see what happens when I shoot myself up with 1kg of morphine etc” are not normal people. Suicidal maniacs...

Okay, sorry. My brain is exploding. So I'm going to just skip all the other blather which my brain is currently producing. It's so hard to put into words.

Basically, all I'm saying is that there has to be some kind of ideal bucket list for everyone. A bucket list equilibrium, which gives the user the highest chance of completing as many bucket list activities as he can. It will factor in the number and nature of activities, the well-being of the individual, and other external factors. Such as whether or not he'll die outside of his activities. You know, stuff like nuclear holocausts and bad eugenics programs...

So yeah, that's about it. I hope you guys can sorta grasp what I'm getting at here. Use your imagination, people. I'm not very good at maths, so I'll leave the formulae for someone else to figure out. Meanwhile...

-Joe

EDIT: I was really bored so I decided to draw this...

Yeah, the right leg wasn't outlined properly. I sorta forgot to do that. And the drill could probably have been neater... How the hell do you draw blood splatter with a pencil, anyway?