Forget Fucking Bucket Lists

Our dreams deserve a swimming pool

Dear nerds¹,

My friend Anna (who, if you watch “British Ghosts,” IS Kitty) recently shared her bucket list with her husband. He’s a very practical CEO with a finance background—the man who carries around a pocket-sized microfiber cloth to clean a screen at a moment’s notice!

He looked at her list and delivered accidental wisdom: “Anna, that’s not a bucket list. You have too many things. They won’t all fit in a bucket.”

And just like that, the swimming pool list was born.

Why Swimming Pools? (Besides the Obvious)

I know, I know—bucket, kick the bucket, death, and all that morbid shit.

Why are we organizing our dreams around a container designed to carry stuff away? Swimming pools, even the questionable ones that have suspicious foam at the edges, are spaces of possibility. They’re places where kids learn to swim, where you become light and free, where someone calls out, “Pizza’s ready” and you bundle up in a towel, leaving wet footprints on the warm cement.

Plus, a swimming pool can hold way more than a bucket. Obviously.

The Art of Pool-Listing

The beauty of a swimming pool list is that it welcomes everything—from the profound to the hilariously mundane. My list includes:

• Put away socks every night instead of leaving them on the living room floor (Sorry, husband, I’m working on it)

• Complete a five-day pub-to-pub walk through the Scottish countryside (That’s exactly my kind of hiking)

• Finally, get my ass to Italy (Not just for a visit—I’m thinking a whole year)

• Pull the trigger on the bathroom remodel (Before the moldy wall crumbles away!)

• Publish my novel (Which, holy shit, is actually happening in October!)

• Return to Turkey (Back to salted olives, hard-boiled eggs and crisp toast for breakfast on a sailing gullet)

• Explore Japan, (Bathe in hot pools while bamboo lightly clinks in the breeze AND visit Harajuku).

The Deep End

Looking at my list, I see patterns. I travel to eat, to buy fabric for my sewing, to explore independent bookstores and find obscure occult museums.

It’s like my swimming pool list is showing me who I am, one dream at a time.

Why This Matters Beyond the Metaphor

Here’s the thing about switching from a bucket to a swimming pool: it changes how you think about possibilities. A bucket is finite. It has a bottom. A swimming pool? That’s a space you can keep filling with dreams of all sizes.

Want to learn Aikido? Throw it in there. Dream of writing fanfiction about sentient cheese? Jump in.

The deep and shallow ends have space for big dreams that excite and terrify. The ones that make you think, Holy shit, can I actually do this?

Your Glorious Swimming Pool!

Create your swimming pool list. Make it ridiculous. Make it profound. Make it entirely yours. Include ALL THE THINGS.

Our lives are too short for bucket lists, but they’re exactly the right length for swimming pool dreams.

With love and lots of water splashing,
Annabel
xxoo

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1. I’m using nerds in the best possible way. Nerdship: How we love a thing with such veracity that we annoy others, and then one magical day we find other people who feel the same way about the thing we love. That is nerdship.