> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.drjerrykennard.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Selfie on Kilimanjaro - URL: https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-motivates-midlife-men/ - Published: 2026-10-05T10:10:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T20:07:54.000Z - Description: In 2007, a film about two terminally ill men compiling a list of things to do before they died turned "bucket list" into a permanent fixture of the language. Nearly two decades on, the phrase has drifted from its original context. It's worth asking what's driving the impulse. - Author: Jerry Kennard - Tags: Life Stages And Transitions Certain men in their forties and fifties are thinking about travelling to Kilimanjaro, learning to fly a Cessna, or being dragged along by a dogsled to see the Northern Lights. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it's worth asking where these ideas come from, and what they're trying to do. ## The bucket list idea The term itself is relatively recent. The 2007 film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, about two men who meet in a cancer ward and set off to complete a list of experiences before they die, largely put "bucket list" into everyday use. Of course, the underlying idea has always existed in terms of deathbed regrets or life-affirming last adventures, but it didn't have a catchy title. What's slightly odd, I think, is how comfortably the phrase migrated from its original context of genuine terminal illness within a matter of months, into general midlife use. I once owned a classic car (Porsche 944, as you ask) which I put up for auction on eBay. A very nice lady won the bid, telling me it was on her bucket list. I've no way of knowing whether she was terminally ill, but I got the impression her list was pretty lengthy. I digress. ## The psychology of it The psychologist Laura Carstensen's work on time horizons, covered from a different angle in my article on [getting older: what's actually happening to your mind ](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/getting-older-whats-actually-happening-to-your-mind/)found that as people become more aware of time as a limited resource, their priorities reorganise around it. In youth, time feels expansive, and the priorities skew toward information-gathering, status-building, and accumulating options. In midlife, as the remaining time starts to feel more finite, the priorities shift toward meaning, depth, and experiences that feel emotionally rich rather than merely useful. The bucket list, in this light, is essentially a blunt instrument response to a genuinely sophisticated psychological shift. The shift is real and worth taking seriously. The list is a relatively crude tool for acting on it, but it's a start. **Mortality.** My article on [what men think about death ](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-men-think-about-death/)covered the broader psychology of mortality awareness, but it's directly relevant here: research consistently finds that when people are prompted to think about their own mortality — even briefly, even indirectly — their stated priorities shift, often quite sharply, toward experience over accumulation, and toward things that feel meaningful rather than things that simply look impressive. A milestone birthday, a friend's diagnosis, a parent's death — any of these can flip the switch, and the bucket list that suddenly gets written the week after is very often a direct, fairly transparent response to a mortality reminder that arrived from somewhere else entirely. ## The problem with the standard-issue list My article on [why success feels empty at 42](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-success-feels-empty-at-42/) made the case that chasing extrinsic goals like status and achievement produces a specific and reliable pattern: a brief spike of satisfaction followed by rapid adaptation back to baseline. The same mechanism applies to a great deal of bucket list content. Kilimanjaro photographs well. It generates a satisfying round of admiration on social media. It ticks a box that a great many other men have also ticked, which is itself part of the appeal — there's a comparison element sitting quietly underneath a fair proportion of bucket-list culture that rarely gets named directly. Don't get me wrong. None of what I've said makes climbing Kilimanjaro a bad idea. It's simply worth being honest about which part of the motivation is genuinely intrinsic — this specific thing matters to me, for reasons that are mine — and which part is status dressed up as adventure. The *hedonic treadmill* doesn't especially care whether the achievement in question is a job title or a mountain. Adaptation happens either way, and the man who completes his list item and feels the satisfaction evaporate within a fortnight has usually discovered, the hard way, that the list was addressing the wrong problem. ## What reliably motivates people [Self-Determination Theory](https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/?ref=drjerrykennard.com), developed by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and referenced elsewhere on this site in relation to work and hobbies, identifies three genuine psychological needs that, when met, produce sustained motivation and wellbeing — as opposed to the brief hit and rapid fade that extrinsic goals tend to produce. **Autonomy** — doing something because you genuinely chose it, rather than because it was expected, inherited from someone else's list, or absorbed from a culture that's decided this is what midlife men are supposed to want. **Competence** — the genuine, felt sense of getting better at something, of capability actually developing, rather than simply completing a single, bounded event and moving on to the next item. **Relatedness** — connection to other people, doing something that either involves or deepens a relationship that matters, rather than a solitary achievement pursued mainly for the story it produces afterwards. Measured against this framework, a fair proportion of standard bucket-list content scores reasonably well on none of the three. The single, one-off, expensive, photogenic experience — book it, do it, tick it, move on — provides very little ongoing competence, very little relatedness unless you deliberately build it in, and the autonomy is frequently questionable, given how much of the content on a typical list has been absorbed wholesale from magazine features and other people's Instagram accounts rather than genuinely arrived at from first principles. ## What's more interesting is . . . Here's a genuinely useful and fairly recent piece of research that speaks directly to this territory, and I think it reframes the whole bucket-list question rather usefully. The psychologist Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues have proposed that a good life isn't fully captured by the two dimensions psychology has traditionally measured — *happiness* (feeling good) and *meaning* (feeling that life has purpose and coherence). They argue for a third, distinct dimension: **psychological richness** — a life characterised by variety, novelty, and experiences that genuinely change your perspective on the world, whether or not those experiences were straightforwardly pleasant or obviously meaningful at the time. This is a genuinely useful reframe of the bucket-list impulse, because it takes seriously something that the happiness-and-meaning framework tends to undervalue: the pull toward novel, perspective-shifting experience is real, legitimate, and psychologically distinct from either pleasure-seeking or purpose-seeking. It's not a lesser motivation dressed up as something nobler. It's its own genuine category. What the research also finds, though, is that psychologically rich experiences aren't reliably the expensive, dramatic, photograph-friendly ones. A difficult, unplanned journey that goes wrong in interesting ways scores higher on richness than a smoothly packaged tour version of the same trip. A genuinely unfamiliar conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like yours can produce more perspective-shift than a scenic mountain summit. Richness comes from novelty and perspective change specifically — not from expense, not from difficulty for its own sake, and not from how well the resulting photograph performs online. > *The mountain isn't the point. The point is whatever the mountain does to how you see things afterwards. If it doesn't do anything — if you come back exactly the same man who left, just with better photos and a sore knee — the list has been completed and the actual need underneath it hasn't been touched at all.* ## What all this means **Interrogate each item honestly: whose want is this?** For each thing on your list, worth asking plainly — do I actually want this, specifically, or do I want to have done it, largely because of what it signals? Both are legitimate motivations, but they're different, and knowing which is which changes how you should actually pursue the thing, and how disappointed you'll be if the achievement itself turns out to be hollow. **Weight the list.** The research on shared experience consistently finds that experiences done with people who matter to you produce considerably more lasting satisfaction than the same experience completed alone, purely for the personal milestone. **Favour ongoing competence over one-off completion.** Learning to sail properly, over years, produces a different and more durable form of satisfaction than a single week's sailing holiday, however memorable. This connects to the article on [why men who fix things are onto something psychologically ](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/men-who-fix-things/)— sustained competence-building tends to outperform single dramatic events on almost every measure of lasting wellbeing. **Deliberately seek out perspective-changing.** Oishi's research suggests the richest experiences are frequently the unplanned, slightly uncomfortable, genuinely unfamiliar ones — not the ones with the best guaranteed itinerary. Worth actively choosing at least a few list items on this basis specifically, rather than filling the whole thing with the well-trodden, thoroughly Instagrammed classics. **Be honest.** If part of what's actually driving the list is a desire to matter, to contribute something, to leave more behind than a collection of personal experiences — that's worth saying directly and addressing directly, rather than hoping a mountain will accidentally satisfy it. ## It doesn't have to be Kilimanjaro The impulse behind the midlife "bucket list" is genuine and worth taking seriously. It's a real, well-documented psychological shift toward experience, meaning and richness that arrives, with real consistency, somewhere in the forties and fifties. It's not vanity, and it's not a crisis dressed up as adventure. But the standard version of the list — expensive, photogenic, largely inherited from other people's lists rather than genuinely chosen, completed alone and ticked off rather than woven into an ongoing life — is frequently a fairly blunt tool for a considerably more sophisticated need. Autonomy, competence, relatedness, and genuine psychological richness. Not "have I done the thing everyone else seems to be doing," but "did that actually change anything about how I see things, and did I do it with someone who matters." Kilimanjaro's still there if you want it. Just be honest, before you book the flights, about what or who it's for.