Life Hacks and Bucket Lists are symptoms of profound spiritual degeneracy

Get them while they're young...

Sometimes the massive popularization of a term is symptomatic* of deep civilizational disorder: two instances are Life Hack and Bucket List.  

Superficially these are harmless diversions - trivial rather than deadly. 

The problem is in what lies underneath the pervasive chatter; the assumptions upon-which these terms are built. 

A Life Hack is an instant, easy, short-cut or cheat; to deal-with some everyday problem of living. 

The assumption of which this is a surface symptom, is that this is how Life ought to be dealt with. 

A profound but concealed assumption of Life Hacking is that human Life consists of a multitude of discrete, immediate problems; and our job is to find the most efficient way to deal with these problems. 

The implication is that our actual Life will incrementally and qualitatively be improved (ie. made more pleasurable, with less suffering) by implementing more and ever-more such Life Hacks. 

The degenerate quality of Life Hacks; is that Life is the kind of thing for which we ought to be seeking quick and easy tricks - that Life is ultimately a set of problems of living that we need to solve.

So the best way to approach Life is to be armed with plenty of Hacks - applicable to the widest possible range of "challenges".

Life Hack attitudes and methods have, it seems, already taken-over student attitudes in formal education. Learning is just too slow, inefficient, and hard work. "Education" is now seen as a set of immediate problems, Tasks; for which the most effective approach is to have a tool-kit quick, easy short-cuts. 

Also academic attitudes in "science". What gets called science nowadays has nothing to do with seeking or speaking truth. "Research" is all about Hacks to get funding, get the necessary results, get published, get cited and invited - get personal security, status and salary.  

And Life Hacks are open-endedly extendible: For instance much Self Help, spiritual teaching of a New Age type, and including the "Manosphere"; is Life Hack thinking applied to human relationships, to love, marriage, family and friendship. 

The same can be seen in discussions of religion.  The Birdemic response of mainstream churches was that their religion was reducible to efficient and convenient Life Hacks; such as live-streamed and recorded "services" or sermons; and no-travel-required online interactions. 

The best ending to a well-lived Life, as depicted by two civilizational role-models

Bucket Lists derive from the idea that somebody is about to die - i.e. "kick the bucket"; and consists of a list of the things I most wish I had-done before I die. 

As if someone is on the deathbed, looking back - and gaining satisfaction or plagued by regret over his accomplishments. 

The underlying idea is that death is annihilation; and/but "therefore" a Good life is one in which we have done as many things that we "really want" to do, before the curtains come down. 

A Bucket List is meant to be a public thing too; so that we can get status (and provoke conversations) by making public a Bucket List - preferably one that is suitably impressive to other people.

And then adverting via social media - or mass media if you are a "celebrity" - our progress in working-through that List. 

You win the game by having an impressive-to-other-people List and completing the List: this is implicitly "to have had a Good Life".

Alternatively; people are invited to feel "sad" with you if, for some reason, you cannot or do not tick of an item - it terminal cancer prevents that bungee jumping, if an insufficiently supported "Kickstarter"-funding prevents you taking that African Safari... 

This is implicitly to have had a "tragic" life.    

Life Hacks and Bucket Lists are both degenerate fads because of their strategic dishonesty. And implicit evil!

Life Hacks are instrumental thinking. 

They are predicated on "using" the world and other people for our own short-term ends, to fulfil our current desires. 

If Life was the kind of thing susceptible to Life Hacks - Life would consist essentially of individuals efforts at learning tricks to exploit each-other; to get satisfaction at their expense.

Life would not be worth living. 

And if Death was the kind of problem that could be In Any Genuine Way ameliorated by the successful completion of Bucket Lists, then death would not be final - death could not be an annihilation. 

Because if Death is the end, then what we have done or not done in life makes no difference.

How we happen to feel about our previous Life, on our death bed, just about to die, looking-back -- would be utterly irrelevant;  because dying would be just one temporary blip of emotion, among multi-millions of others - doomed to nothingness. 

I

f after Death we will be gone utterly - then it cannot possibly matter either way whether or not we watched the sun rise, or set, off the Florida Keys.  

Yet, if Death is not really the end; and we will survive in some form, to be affected in some way by our completion (or not) of Bucket Lists...

Then Life after Death is something that needs explicitly to be acknowledged, and its implications explored. 

 

So yes; at one level these are trivial fads; "just" a harmless way of passing the time or having something to gossip about... Yet Life Hacks and Bucket lists are evidence of the deep, unacknowledged, and contradictory malaise of our civilization: of the ways in which we persistently refuse to think-through implications. 

*A symptom is produced by the underlying pathology (in this instance, spiritual degeneracy); but a symptom is not conclusive evidence for the underlying pathology. So, you can have the pathology without the symptom, and vice versa.