01-May-1999 to 16-Sept-2026 -> 10000 days.

I turned 10,000 days old today. Twenty-seven is an age you put in a bio. 10,000 you reflect. So, I did what anyone with a public bucket list would do: I opened it and started deleting dreams.

My public list of a hundred things to do before I die. It lives on my blog like a contract nobody signed.

A whole cricket fanatic section died in one sitting. “Watch a Boxing Day test at the MCG”, “Meet one of Sachin, Virat, Dhoni”, “Work as a cricket analyst” - just deleted. No obituary. Somewhere in the range of 9000 days, cricket stopped being a personality trait and became just a sport.

The celebrity glaze wore off. I now follow exactly two famous people on Instagram. Virat, for the fitness inspiration. Karan Aujla, for the music. Technically one cricketer survived the purge.

“Travel to 25 countries” became “travel to 100 countries.” “Five languages, intermediate” became “five languages, expert” and got a tick the same day. I just looked at the word intermediate, felt personally attacked by it, and promoted myself. Publishing it was supposed to hold me accountable. If a third person read this list’s edit history, they would call it cheating. I think it’s the opposite.

At twenty the list was born, basic in the way a twenty-year-old’s list should be: vague and ambitious, stolen from other people’s bucket lists. Every item believed that finishing it would fix something. Now I wipe it clean every few months, and I add things I wouldn’t have dared to write down then: my own standup set, a three-Michelin-star dinner, the Annapurna circuit.

A mathematician would call this unbounded: every goal is finite, but there is no ceiling I cannot rewrite. The list is the proof: the 25-country version was just a term in the sequence. The kid who wrote the first version would find me cool as fuck. I owe him more than that though. I went from over-aggressive to relaxed in college. Or so people tell me. I only got here because that twenty-year-old asked for help and took advice. And read.

Day 20,000 lands on 1st February 2054. I’ll be 54. If the pattern holds, the list will have been emptied and refilled four or five times by then. Fewer stadiums, more health. Fewer solo trips, more trips with people who share my surname. A wealth section I don’t yet know how to write without sounding like a pompous asshole.

In March 2025, item “100. Die with no regrets. ✓.” was added. Looking back I have no idea what past me was thinking. It’s the only item that matters, and apparently I’d already given myself full marks (548 days ago ;p). I put it back on my blog, because the sequence isn’t done - and it never will.

A closed list is the only version of this list I’d regret.