Why do we keep saying 'someday' instead of making actual plans?

It's a combination of temporal discounting — our brains reliably value present comfort over future reward — and what psychologists call the arrival fallacy, the belief that we'll be better positioned to pursue meaningful things once some current obstacle is resolved. The obstacle keeps resolving into the next one. The someday keeps sliding forward.

What is temporal discounting and how does it cause procrastination?

Temporal discounting is the psychological tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future ones, even when the future rewards are objectively more meaningful. You might rationally prefer the trip you've been dreaming about for years over another evening of television — but in any given evening, television wins because it's available right now and the trip requires planning and effort. This is the core mechanism behind most someday thinking.

How do I stop putting off important life experiences?

The most reliable technique is giving the thing a specific date. Not a general intention — a date on a calendar. Research on implementation intentions shows that a vague goal paired with a specific plan is dramatically more likely to be executed than a vague goal alone. 'I want to go to Japan someday' stays in the someday pile indefinitely. 'I'm researching flights for April' is a project with momentum.

What is the arrival fallacy?

The arrival fallacy, a term coined by positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, describes the mistaken belief that readiness or happiness will arrive once a specific goal is reached. 'When I finish this project, I'll plan that trip.' 'When the kids are older, we'll finally travel.' The fallacy is in assuming that arriving at the milestone produces the readiness it promised. It rarely does — because life's next chapter usually comes with its own set of reasons to wait.

Is there a way to make my bucket list feel more urgent without feeling anxious about it?

Yes — make the time concrete rather than abstract. Tools like the Life in Weeks visualization, where each week of your life is a visible box in a grid, convert the vague sense that 'life is short' into something you can actually see and count. When people first use it, the reaction is rarely dread. It's usually clarity. The fog of infinite future lifts a little, and someday has to compete with actual, numbered weeks.

The Someday Trap: Why We Keep Deferring the Experiences That Matter Most

Q: Do people regret the things they do or the things they don't do?

In the short term, people regret actions more than inactions. But over longer time horizons, that reverses sharply. Tom Gilovich's research at Cornell found that in old age, people report regretting inactions at roughly twice the rate of actions. The temporary sting of a failed attempt fades. The permanent absence of something you never tried does not.

Somewhere in your life, there’s a trip you’ve been meaning to take for five years. Maybe longer. You’ve probably looked at flights once or twice. You’ve talked about it with someone who said they’d come. You might have a folder of saved photos from the destination.

You haven’t gone.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a documented psychological pattern, predictable enough that researchers have named it, studied its mechanics, and mapped exactly where it breaks down. Most people carry a mental list of things they’ll do when the time is right — when they’re less busy, when the money is there, when work settles down, when this particular season of life resolves.

The time rarely arrives. Not because life never improves, but because someday isn’t a date.

Why Someday Feels Like a Plan (But Isn’t)

The word someday does something specific to the brain: it creates the sensation of a decision without the commitment of one.

When you say “I’ll do that someday,” there’s a small, genuine pleasure in saying it. You’ve acknowledged the thing. You’ve placed it in your mental queue. Your brain files it under future rewards and produces a faint anticipatory hit. The experience feels half-real already.

The problem is that this sensation closely mimics the feeling of actually planning something — without any of the constraints that make planning real. No date. No cost. No person to tell. No calendar entry. Nothing that can be missed, and therefore nothing that creates urgency.

So the impulse gets quieted. The item stays where it is. You move on to something more immediately available.

Then years pass.

The Brain Science Behind the Delay

The mechanism has a name: temporal discounting.

It describes the universal human tendency to devalue future rewards relative to present ones, even when we rationally prefer the future reward. Given a choice between $100 today or $120 in a month, most people take the $100. The rational calculation says to wait; the brain overrules it.

The same architecture governs how we weigh future experiences. An evening of television is available right now, requires no planning, and costs nothing in the moment. The trip to Japan requires research, decisions, money, and coordinating calendars. Both are technically available — one immediately, one through a gate of effort — and the gate is reliably enough to defer the trip for years.

This isn’t weakness. It’s the standard factory setting of human cognition. Evolutionarily, it made sense: immediate resources were real and certain; future resources were speculative. But it’s a poor fit for a world where the most meaningful experiences require planning and the most ordinary ones are available on demand.

The net result: the things most worth doing lose the daily competition against the things most easily done, every single day, until the window quietly closes.

The Arrival Fallacy

There’s a second trap layered inside the first.

Most someday thinking comes with a condition attached: I’ll do it when things settle down. When work calms. When the kids are a bit more independent. When the mortgage is lower. When I have more headspace.

Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the arrival fallacy: the belief that once you reach a certain point — finish the project, pay off the debt, resolve the current demanding thing — the readiness you’ve been waiting for will actually materialize.

It rarely does. Not because things don’t improve, but because improving circumstances reveal the next layer of circumstances. The project finishes and the next one starts. The kids grow and the worry shifts form. The mortgage shrinks and a different constraint appears. The arrival point that will finally unlock the trip keeps appearing at a distance.

This is one of the most replicated findings in happiness research: future circumstances are systematically poorer predictors of wellbeing than people expect. We adapt faster to improved conditions than we anticipate. The readiness that was supposed to arrive with the next milestone usually doesn’t — because it was always dependent on conditions, and our conditions are always in flux.

The Regret That Comes Quietly

Here’s the finding that tends to shift something.

In the short term, people tend to regret actions more than inactions. Do something that doesn’t work out, and the sting is immediate. That’s real.

Over longer time horizons, the calculus reverses. Tom Gilovich’s research at Cornell, studying regret patterns across life spans, found that in old age, people report regretting inactions at roughly twice the rate of actions. Failed attempts fade; the permanent absence of an attempt does not.

Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who documented the most common regrets of the dying, found the same pattern playing out at the end of life. The most frequently cited regret wasn’t something that had been done badly. It was: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. The regret is predominantly one of omission — things deferred, choices defaulted into by inaction, experiences left in the someday pile until the pile couldn’t be revisited.

The someday trap is quiet. It doesn’t feel like a cost while you’re in it. It feels sensible, even responsible. The cost gets deferred right along with everything else — until it can’t be undone.

Making the Time Visible

Abstract knowledge about mortality doesn’t change much. The understanding that “life is short” is universally shared; it doesn’t reliably produce action. Everyone knows. Almost nobody changes their behavior on the basis of knowing.

What does change behavior is making the finite time concrete and visible.

One tool that reliably produces this shift is the Life in Weeks grid: a visualization where each of your expected 90 years is broken into 52 weeks, and each box represents one week of your life. You mark the weeks you’ve lived. You look at what remains. Not as an exercise in dread, but as a reality check: there are a specific, countable number of boxes left, and some of them already have commitments written in.

When people first look at this, the reaction is usually not panic. It’s closer to clarity. The comfortable fog of I have plenty of time lifts a little. The future stops being an infinite abstract and becomes something you can see and navigate. Someday has to compete with actual, numbered weeks.

This is what the Life in Weeks tracker does psychologically — it applies the same principle that makes financial budgeting work to time. Seeing actual numbers rather than a vague impression of abundance changes what you decide to do with the resource.

The Mechanism That Actually Works

The research on converting someday-thinking into action converges on a specific finding: implementation intentions.

A goal without a concrete plan attached is dramatically less likely to be executed than the same goal with one. Not a vague plan — a specific one: when, where, with whom, and what the first step is.

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, who has studied this across dozens of experiments, found that framing intentions as “when X happens, I will do Y” roughly doubles execution rates compared to simple goal-setting. It’s the specificity that drives behavior, not the strength of the desire.

Applied to someday-thinking, this comes down to three questions:

What would the first concrete step look like? Not “I should learn to dive someday” — “I should search beginner dive courses in my city this weekend.” Not “I want to see Japan” — “I need to look at when flights are cheapest in the next six months.” The first step is almost never large. The problem is usually that it hasn’t been identified and assigned a time.

When will I take that step? Not “soon” — a specific day. This week. Thursday morning. The research on behavior change consistently shows that time-stamped intentions dramatically outperform undated ones. The moment you assign a day, the action becomes real rather than pending.

Who knows I’m doing this? Not for performance — for accountability. One person who will ask how it went. The goal research from Dominican University found that people who wrote goals down and sent weekly updates to a single trusted person completed them at 76%, versus 35% for those who kept goals private. That’s not a small difference. It’s roughly double the follow-through rate from one behavioral change.

That’s the whole mechanism. Not a burst of motivation, not the right season, not finally having enough money. Specificity, a date, and one person who knows.

Where to Start

The simplest version: write the thing down.

Not in your head, where it’s been living for years, quietly losing the daily competition against everything more immediately available. In a document, an app, on paper — somewhere that exists outside your mental queue and can be returned to. Somewhere that can receive a date and a first step. Somewhere you can share with one person who’ll ask about it.

Buckist is built for exactly this problem: capturing the experiences that keep getting deferred, organizing them so you can see what actually matters to you, browsing inspiration when you can’t quite name what you want, watching the life in weeks grid so the someday feels appropriately urgent, and sharing the list with the one or two people who should know what you’re working toward.

The trip that’s been sitting in your mental queue for five years is almost certainly still possible. The window hasn’t closed. But it requires moving the thing out of the place where it’s been quietly losing — the mental pile where everything competes against everything else, and immediacy always wins — and into a format that has a name, a shape, and at least the beginning of a plan.

Someday is a holding pen. The goal is to empty it.

For more on why planned experiences generate happiness before they even happen, The Anticipation Effect covers the neuroscience. If the harder problem is figuring out what belongs on your list in the first place, Bucket List Inspiration: How to Find Ideas That Actually Feel Like You starts from scratch.

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