🥂 Appetiser: The value of a Bucket List
I spent most of last week on my couch – sucker‑punched by the flu. As I stared into the foggy extremities of my exhausted brain, chest heaving, nose running, I felt a strange sense of what I can only describe as faith. A sudden realisation that I was in process. My body and mind in need of an inevitable reset. A slowing down.
I know all too well that sickness is often directly correlated with burnout. A physical reminder that the burdens of work and life have cracked the cup of mental and emotional capacity. As my head hit the pillow for a midday nap I could see a delirious thought caught between the edges of my wakefulness. A question I have come to wrestle with in the mud of times gone by.
What do you want?
Many long days and nights have been spent rolling down the slopes and valleys of each letter and implication of such words. As I drifted towards sleep I sunk deeply into myself.
What do I want?
For the first time in a long time, I have been operating without specific goals or objectives. I have rid myself of morning affirmations and long‑term strategy documents and instead spent my weeks floating in the obscurity of serendipitous happenings. I walk the same path to and from work every day, but choose new routes off impulse. I think and I act on the demands of the day and week, avoiding the vagueness of the long‑term trajectory of compounding events. I iterate on habits and accept that any self‑imposed pressure on financial, career or creative aspirations is nothing more than a distraction.
I have found peace in this state of simmering presence. I have continued to learn and grow and uncover new layers of myself through the natural ebbs and flows of what the outside world would categorise as “good” and “bad” events. If anything, I have proven to myself that I can exist and find joy in the simplest and most intuitive frame of my life.
But…
I have also found myself craving some clarity in direction. As I continue to step across obscure stones of intersecting contexts, I can’t help but feel like the fire of my ambition needs fuel to burn. I have tried every goal framework on the internet. Every KPI system and strategy implementation device. I have been a sponge of the “self help” movement since I first learned what a podcast was, and yet these shining endorsements of goal setting continue to feel inauthentic to the life I wish to live. Goals have come to feel like pressure. Like thumbtacks on the chair of life, pricking you every time you attempt to sit down and soak in the sunshine. Goals have also always felt dependent on other goals. A never‑ending chain of actions and reactions that inevitably end up incomplete or utterly obscured.
As I reacclimatise to the natural flow of my life, I am interested in a new bucket for my ambitions. A slightly refined frame for me to carry forward into everything I do. A bucket list of all the things I hope to do, achieve and experience during this one life that seems to flash past at a rapidly increasing pace.
The limitation of goals is that they can suffocate the space between the vast interests and areas of your life. They can make the multi‑dimensional nature of all the things you aspire to do feel one‑dimensional and dependent on a predefined pathway and order of achievement.
A bucket list on the other hand allows flexibility and space for the natural flow of life to play out around the ambitions that drive you. A bucket list exists more as a compass, a guiding light that signals the direction your life choices might move you towards without restricting your creativity or enforcing a feeling of pressure on who you are becoming.
Recent research in motivation psychology supports this. Studies in Frontiers in Psychology have shown that people who orient themselves around “intrinsic aspirations”—personal growth, connection, experiences—report higher life satisfaction than those driven by extrinsic goal‑tracking. A bucket list is less a tally and more an open invitation to those intrinsic pulls.
The bucket list liberates you in the sense it gives you a platform to expand on. A way to capture the impulses of what you hope to do and achieve without defining or otherwise limiting your ambitions to who you are currently. It embraces the chaos of the modern world and sets you up with a range of things to notice, to lean into, to catch as they appear. It removes the rigidity of goals and welcomes the creativity of discovering how, when, with whom, and most importantly why.
And maybe that’s the secret power.
A bucket list teaches you to look up—not with the frantic reach of someone chasing, but with the quiet alertness of someone ready to notice. To follow what catches your attention in the moment. To let the compass exist without demanding a map.
🥗 Starter — Field Notes
🧠 The future is built by our elders
The biggest failing in the west is the speed in which we have sacrificed our intergenerational connection. Fewer and fewer families live in multi-generational households, with hundreds of thousands of our elders living in isolated “retirement” communities. Our younger generations, on the other hand, continue to isolate themselves through a disproportionate reliance on technology. The technological gap is going to continue to widen as AI infiltrates all areas of work and life, expanding the space between us, while we sacrifice the natural wisdom sharing infrastructure of our ancestors.
From a financial perspective, over 50’s hold approximately 56% of Australia’s wealth, meaning they are most primed to influence and build the social and communal architecture that will shape the future. Yet this group has never been more disconnected from the children and grand-children they aspire to impact.
There is a critical need for more spaces for intergenerational relationships, communal networking and technological education. We must pave a pathway of storytelling, communal sharing and collaboration across age groups.
🧠 You must stay ahead of the curve
You have a responsibility to your future self to stay ahead of the technological curve. Things are happening quickly and the wave of cultural change is turning tidal. In a matter of months we have seen AI infrastructure expand from niche use cases to essential collaboration tools in all areas of life and work. This is not a fad, but a monumental shift in what it means to be a human being. We cannot afford to be left behind. We must understand the breadth of what is occurring. Comprehend the key players and keep tabs on how new advancements will change the nature of what we do. We don’t have to use AI for everything but we have a responsibility to understand what it can do and how it can be used.
🧠 You are a moving target
You are a moving target. Even when you are still, your cells remain in motion. Your thoughts caught on various trains across a myriad of stations. The beat of life pulses around us, motion in our veins, and yet we are so often caught out of sync. We must learn to accept our inevitable movement. Recognising that even in stillness we hold a momentum that captures our inherent humanness.
🍝 Main — Build Log:
AI video is going to change how we tell stories…
I’ve spent the week playing with Google’s Veo 3 AI video model.
From a absurdist statue garden:
To a Surrealist Goat installation:
To a modern Australian Porsche Commercial:
AI video is becoming more and more interesting. The quality has improved immensely over the past 12 months and this really is just the beginning. The future of Filmmaking, content creation and creative direction will be shaped by creatives who can utilise these tools in tandem with their established skillsets.
🍷 Side Pairings — This Week’s Creative Stack
Video – The Future of AI — This video is an interesting exploration of the possible future we face in regards to the rapid advancement of AI.
Quote – "The truest resistance to the oppression of conformity is the riot of human diversity, the singular nature of the individual and their individual expression, the non-deterministic variability of things we—all of us—think and do and make. Difference is the seed value of our human process.” - Edward Snowden
Tool - Same Energy - A visual search engine for creative stimulus.
🍮 Dessert — Something to Think About
What are you striving for? Are you enjoying the pursuit?
That’s all from us this week - Let us know how we can make Brilliant Bytes more valuable for you by replying to this email.
Thanks for being Brilliant,
Zed