A Bucket List for You and Your Siblings: 30 Ideas for Adult Brothers and Sisters
Here’s something I realised a few years ago: I know my siblings’ childhood habits better than their current ones.
I know who hid vegetables under the table. I know who lost every board game and sulked for an hour. I know who sang in the bathroom. What I couldn’t have told you was what any of them were stressed about this month, or what they’d do with a free Saturday.
That’s the quiet thing that happens with adult siblings. Nobody has a fight. Nobody decides to drift. Everyone just gets busy, moves for work, starts a family, and the relationship slides into “we’ll see each other at holidays.”
And then there’s a strange moment, usually at a wedding or a funeral, when you look across the room at the person who shared your childhood bedroom and think: I should really see them more.
This post is for that moment. Here’s a bucket list for you and your siblings, plus a few thoughts on how to actually make it happen.
Why Sibling Relationships Need Planning (Of All Things)
Friendships have a natural structure: you choose to meet. Romantic relationships have one too: you share a home, or at least a calendar.
Siblings have neither. The default is shared history without shared logistics. You’re connected by blood, which is both a strength (you’ll show up in a crisis) and a trap (you assume the relationship will take care of itself).
It won’t, quite. Not without something to do together.
Here’s the sobering math. If you live in different cities and see each other a few times a year, you might spend, say, ten days a year with a sibling. That’s it. Over the next thirty years, that’s about 300 days. Less than a year, total, of time with the person who’s known you longest.
(If you want to see what that looks like on a bigger scale, try putting your life in a weeks grid. It’s a sobering and clarifying exercise.)
The good news: it doesn’t take much to change that. A handful of planned experiences a year can make an enormous difference.
30 Bucket List Ideas for Adult Siblings
Revisit the past
- Go back to your childhood home or neighbourhood. Walk the streets. Argue about which house was which.
- Recreate a childhood tradition. The weird breakfast, the Sunday game, the road trip song.
- Go through old photos together. Tell the real stories. You’ll find out you remember the same event completely differently.
- Cook the family recipe together. Get it written down before it’s lost. (Bonus: record the cooking and the stories.)
- Interview your parents as a team. Ask the questions you’ve never asked. Here are some good ones to start with.
- Visit the place your family always talked about. The hometown, the village, the beach from the old stories.
Try something new
- Take a class where you’re all beginners. Pottery, salsa, rock climbing. Being bad together is a great equaliser. (See the joy of being bad at something.)
- Do a weekend trip with no itinerary. Just a place, a car, and a vague sense of direction.
- Hike a trail you’ve been saving. Doesn’t have to be famous. It just has to be long enough for real conversation.
- Run a race together. Not to win. Just to have a shared goal and a good excuse to train.
- Try a food you’ve never eaten. Pick a cuisine neither of you knows. Make it a ritual.
- Volunteer together for a day. It gives you something to do while you catch up, and it feels good.
Go further
- Take a sibling trip. Even a short one, and even if it’s only two of you. Spend three days away without partners or kids.
- Visit a country none of you have been to. Plan it a year ahead. The planning is half the fun.
- Take your parents on a trip, together. A shared gift to them is also a shared project for you.
- Go back to where you grew up, for a week. No hotel. Just family, chaos, and old rooms.
- Celebrate a milestone birthday with a trip. The big ones are good excuses.
- Pick a destination from a shared list. Everyone adds a place, and you pick one at random each year.
Build a rhythm
- A monthly call, same time every month. Put it in the calendar. Don’t make it a big deal.
- A sibling group chat that isn’t just logistics. Photos, bad jokes, small updates.
- An annual sibling weekend. Same weekend each year, different place. It’s a tradition in the making.
- A shared book or show. Read the same book, watch the same series, talk about it.
- A recurring “debrief” over dinner. Quarterly, wherever you can.
- A year-end swap. Each sibling shares one highlight and one hope for the coming year.
Do something that matters
- Write letters to each other. Not for any occasion. Just because.
- Start a family project. A recipe book, a photo archive, a family tree.
- Plan something for a sibling who’s going through a hard time. Showing up beats saying the right thing.
- Save for a shared goal. A trip, a gift for your parents, a family home renovation.
- Make a plan for how you’ll look after your parents, together. Not fun, but it matters. Do it before the crisis, not during.
- Say the thing you’ve never said. Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m proud of you. It’s easier than you think, and it lands harder than you expect.
How to Actually Make It Happen
The problem with sibling plans is that everyone says, “We should totally do this,” and then nothing happens. A few things help.
1. Make it one person’s job (and rotate it)
If nobody owns it, nothing happens. If one person owns it every time, they’ll burn out. Take turns: this year’s trip is yours to plan, next year it’s your brother’s.
2. Start with one thing, not thirty
Pick one item from the list. Put a date on it. Resist the temptation to plan the dream sibling renaissance. A single dinner you actually have beats ten trips you only talk about.
3. Use a shared list
This is where it gets practical. A shared list that everyone can see and add to turns vague intentions (“we should go to Portugal someday”) into something concrete and visible. It also makes sure everyone gets a say, which matters more with siblings than almost anyone. Old family dynamics have a way of letting the loudest sibling decide. A shared list evens things out. More on that in how to share your bucket list.
4. Plan around the calendar, not the dream
“Someday” is where sibling plans go to die (more on that in the someday trap). Look at your real calendars. Book the weekend. Then figure out the details.
5. Lower the bar
Not every gathering needs to be a Big Moment. A pizza night and a card game is a legitimate sibling bucket list item. You’re not building a highlight reel. You’re building a relationship.
What If You Don’t Get Along?
Not every sibling relationship is warm. Some are tense, some are distant, and some carry real history.
If that’s you, don’t start with a week-long trip. Start tiny and neutral. Pick something with a built-in focus: a hike, a game, a meal, a movie. Activities give you something to do besides talk about the past.
You don’t have to fix everything. You’re just creating one new shared memory that isn’t about the old story. That’s often enough to shift something.
The Quiet Math of Siblings
Your siblings are probably the people who’ll be in your life longest. They knew you before your job, before your partner, before you had opinions about anything. They’ll likely outlive your parents, and they’re the only other people who remember what it was like in that house.
That’s a lot of weight for a relationship that mostly runs on autopilot.
So give it a little attention. Pick one thing from the list. Text your sibling today.
It’s a small step. But in a few years, you’ll be glad you took it.
Buckist is a bucket list app for keeping what you actually want to do in one place: browse ideas when you’re stuck, see your life in weeks, and share your list with the people you’ll do it with.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a sibling bucket list?
- A sibling bucket list is a shared list of experiences you want to do with your brothers and sisters: trips, meals, projects, and small rituals. Its purpose is to give adult siblings a reason to spend time together on purpose, since by default, adult life pulls families in different directions.
- What are good bucket list ideas for adult siblings?
- Take a trip to the place your family always talked about, recreate a childhood tradition, cook the family recipe together, interview your parents as a team, take a class you'd all be bad at, run or hike something together, or simply plan a recurring monthly call. The best ideas combine nostalgia with something new.
- How do siblings stay close as adults?
- Mostly through repeated small contact and a few shared plans. Regular low-stakes check-ins, a group chat that isn't only logistics, and one planned experience a year do more than occasional big reunions. Having something concrete to look forward to together keeps the relationship active instead of just assumed.
- How can I plan a bucket list with siblings who live far away?
- Use a shared list everyone can add to, pick things that can be done remotely (a virtual cooking night, a shared book, a synchronised challenge), and set one in-person meetup a year, planned well in advance so schedules can line up. Splitting the planning among siblings keeps one person from carrying it all.
- What if my siblings and I don't get along?
- Start tiny and neutral. Pick an activity with a built-in focus (a game, a hike, a meal) so you're not forced into heavy conversation. You don't need to fix the relationship in one outing. You're just creating one new shared memory that isn't about the old story.
