The Happiness Researcher Who Started Crossing Things Off His Bucket List

Arthur Brooks had spent years doing what most people are told will make them happy. By 50, the happiness researcher had worked through a bucket list he had written at 40, checking off every goal he once believed would make his life feel complete. The strange part came afterward. Instead of feeling satisfied, Brooks realized he was less happy than he had been a decade earlier. For someone whose career revolves around understanding human happiness, the discovery was hard to ignore. There was something deeply uncomfortable about reaching the finish line and discovering that the feeling he expected was nowhere to be found.

“I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I’d checked everything off that list. And I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40,” Brooks said. The realization forced him to confront a problem that goes far beyond his own career or ambitions. People can spend years chasing promotions, money, recognition, possessions and personal milestones, only to discover that the satisfaction they expected disappears almost as quickly as it arrives. Brooks eventually came up with a surprisingly simple response: instead of making a bigger bucket list, he started crossing his desires off one by one.

The Bucket List That Was Supposed To Make Him Happy

Brooks is hardly someone who stumbled into the subject of happiness by accident. He teaches at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School and co-wrote Building the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with Oprah Winfrey. That background made his experience particularly revealing because Brooks had followed the familiar formula for success: set ambitious goals, work toward them, achieve them and then move on to the next target. But completing the list did not deliver the emotional payoff he expected. “This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package,” Brooks explained. “I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come from having more.”

That mistake is easy to recognize because the cycle rarely stops at one achievement. A promotion can create a desire for an even bigger position. A larger house can make a better neighborhood seem necessary. A successful project can turn into a demand for even greater recognition. Psychologists describe part of this process through the idea of the hedonic treadmill. People can experience a burst of pleasure after a positive change, then gradually return toward their previous emotional baseline. The result is a strange pattern: the goal changes, the excitement fades and another goal appears.

Brooks Has A Simple Formula For The Problem

Brooks eventually reduced his thinking to a formula simple enough to write down in seconds. “Lasting and stable satisfaction comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants,” he said. The idea is straightforward. What a person has forms the top of the fraction, while what that person wants forms the bottom. That creates two possible ways to change the equation. Someone can keep adding more to the top, or they can reduce what sits underneath it.

“You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more, or permanently and securely by wanting less,” Brooks said. That distinction gets at the problem with endless achievement. Getting more can produce satisfaction, but the effect may be temporary if every achievement immediately creates another demand. Consider what happens after a major raise. The extra money may feel fantastic at first, then the person starts considering a larger home, a more expensive car or a new lifestyle that requires even more money. The original increase has not necessarily made the person unhappy. The expanding list of expectations can simply prevent the increase from ever feeling like enough.

Even Tom Brady Questioned What Success Was Missing

Brooks’ argument becomes easier to understand when looking at people who had already reached extraordinary levels of success. Tom Brady once raised the same question during a 2005 60 Minutes interview. “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings, and still think there’s something greater out there for me?” Brady asked. The question captures the strange problem with treating achievement as the final destination. If three championships cannot eliminate the feeling that something is missing, adding another trophy may not solve the underlying problem either.

Brooks draws on the work of medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas when describing four desires that can become false sources of fulfillment. Money can create new expectations and new things to pursue. Power can make even greater influence seem necessary. Pleasure can become something a person continually tries to increase. Fame can create an endless demand for more attention and approval. None of these things is automatically bad. The problem comes when a person expects them to provide a permanent sense of satisfaction.

The Reverse Bucket List Changes The Question

Brooks eventually abandoned the traditional bucket list and replaced it with something that sounds almost backward. “I used to have a bucket list. Now, I have a reverse bucket list,” he says. The ritual happens on his birthday. Rather than writing down everything he hopes to accomplish, Brooks writes down the worldly desires and ambitions currently occupying his mind. Then he crosses them out.

“I write them down on my birthday, and I cross them out,” he explained. The desires can be surprisingly ordinary. Brooks has mentioned wanting a certain number of sales for a new book or wanting greater prestige within his university. Writing those desires down does not mean he suddenly stops working toward them. The purpose is to expose them. A vague desire can quietly influence decisions without ever being examined. Putting it on paper forces the person to see what they are actually chasing and ask how much control that desire has over their sense of well-being.

The Goal Can Stay. The Obsession Does Not Have To

Crossing out a desire does not mean giving up on ambition. Brooks still writes books. He still works. He still has professional goals. What changes is the emotional bargain attached to those goals. “Maybe I get it, maybe I don’t,” is how he describes the mindset. That approach allows a person to pursue something seriously without making happiness dependent on getting it. A promotion can remain worth pursuing. A book can still be worth selling. A personal milestone can still be worth working toward. The difference is what happens emotionally if the desired result never arrives.

Brooks describes his approach in simple terms: “I want to manage them.” The desires can exist without becoming the boss. That may be the most useful part of the exercise because wanting less does not require becoming passive. Someone can remain ambitious while recognizing that achievement alone cannot guarantee lasting satisfaction. The goal remains in sight, but it no longer gets to decide whether the person feels successful.

The Idea Goes Back Much Further Than Brooks

Brooks did not invent the idea that reducing desire can change how a person experiences life. Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively about controlling desires and separating what can be controlled from what cannot. Buddhist teachings have also examined craving and attachment as major sources of suffering for more than two thousand years. Brooks’ reverse bucket list puts a modern, practical spin on ideas that have existed for centuries.

The method also has a related version focused on the opposite direction. Instead of listing what you still want, a person can list what they have already achieved, experienced or survived. That approach shifts attention away from the unfinished future and toward the evidence already sitting in the past. Both exercises challenge the same mental habit: constantly measuring life by what has not happened yet.

Try The Reverse Bucket List On Your Next Birthday

The exercise itself takes very little time. Start with the things currently occupying your mind. Think about the promotion, purchase, award, relationship milestone, career target or financial number that you believe will make you feel more satisfied. Write them down. Then ask yourself what would happen if you actually got each one. Would the satisfaction last for years, or would another target quickly replace it? Finally, cross the desire out.

You do not have to stop pursuing it. The point is to stop giving the outcome complete control over your happiness. That can turn a goal from a requirement into an option. For anyone caught in the cycle of achieving one thing only to immediately chase another, the exercise offers a way to see the pattern on paper instead of simply living inside it.

The Next List Could Look Very Different

Brooks’ original bucket list took him ten years to complete. The lesson he took from it was not that goals are pointless. It was that a completed goal cannot guarantee the feeling people often attach to it. A birthday reverse bucket list offers a small way to confront that problem before another decade disappears into the next achievement.

The next time a goal feels like the missing piece of your life, put it on paper first. Then cross it out and see whether you still want it. The goal may remain worth chasing, but it no longer has to determine whether you believe your life is enough.