Constantly changing bucket list

A semi-serious answer for a jokey question: I don't have a bucket list. Instead I have a list of things I like, which are much vaguer, e.g.

1. Seeing new wildlife, particularly peepy birds

2. Swimming in the sea when it is actually a pleasant temperature

3. Naturally hot water

4. sitting in a cafe with decent wifi drinking coffee and eating pastries and 'working from home' in a foreign country when no one, not even my line manager, actually knows where I am.

5. Taking trains rather than planes

etc.

therefore my aim now is to fulfill those wants, rather than pinning it to specific destinations.

I've stopped keeping any kind of proper list, just a bunch of vague ideas. A few years back I could've listed off the top sites on my bucket list, no problem: Petra (and Jordan in general), Iceland, Turkey, Machu Picchu, and a few others that I'm definitely forgetting now.

In practice, I'd always end up visiting other places for similar reasons as you describe in your OP. I'd come across something that sounded interesting, ignore any current plans for destinations on my list, and go to the new one instead. After realising that I was doing that all the time, my list is now more along the lines of "If and when I end up in X, do this" rather than a list of set countries to try and visit.

I stopped having a bucket list for this exact reason.

I'm quite similar as my 'bucketlist' changes every week depending on which country/region I've been researching at the time. I tried making a fairly detailed bucketlist once but it became waaaaay too long and I realised it wasn't worth the effort for me. At the end of the day, whatever my bucketlist is, it's always topped simply by 'travel'. Like your example of flying to HK because it was cheap and you had time - that's an awesome way to travel and see the world, and often some of the best experiences are spur-of-the-moment type adventures. Eventually, you will probably come full circle and do a similar trip to somewhere like Paris and the other destinations on your original bucketlist. I wouldn't worry too much. Focus on and enjoy the travel you do at the moment and stop worrying about the future too much. If you are desperate to go somewhere, you will make it happen at some point. Just gotta grapple with the fact that we can't be everywhere at once.

I don't have a bucket list but what you describe is more akin to the Traveler's Curse.

This is a cut & paste, not my words:

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that’s perfect (we all know there’s no Shangri-La), but just for a place that’s “just right for you.” But the curse is that the odds of finding “just right” get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can’t travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you’ve seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It’s just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that’s like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.

Is this really something to worry about? Is having a come-out-of-nowhere situation like Hong Kong a bad thing, even if it bumps Paris or wherever?...

Stop having a bucket list. Surely it must be one of the stupidest concepts of our generation.

I don't think those destinations are part of a bucket list, they're just places you want to visit.

How do I cope with this? I never really wanted to go to Hong Kong, for example, but the flights were really cheap/.../

If visiting several destinations is important then get a multi-stage trip, or RTW ticket and just go there.

Also, you've been bitten by the travel bug. Sorry mate, you're one of us now. You'll eventually move abroad for a while.

and I had two weeks off

Nobody longs for more time in the office when in the deathbed. See, a bucket list is the things you want to have experienced by the time you die.

If you get diagnosed with an aggressive illness you may have very little time to do the things you really want to experience - you may not be able to do them anymore - hence items in a bucket list have kind of a priority to them.

If you're not going to Paris because Hong Kong was on a promo, it has no priority at all.

So... what do you really want?

Yeah, just like others who posted already, I don't have a bucket list per se. I want to go everywhere, and even places I wasn't interested in at the beginning turned out to be worthwhile when I finally went. So when I know I'm going somewhere, I'm doing a bit of research to find out what to do and where to go, but also spend a lot of time just walking around and absorbing the vibe.

i don't have a bucket list. i keep a google map and drop pins on it when i hear of something i want to see/do/eat. then when i'm trip planning i find a region i want to visit and see what's on the map there.

I mostly just think of "bucket list" in terms of whatever trip I'm seriously planning. What are my musts for this trip? What realistically can I actually accomplish?