This is the video of a TEDx talk in Maui late last year, featuring my old friend Ed, whom I’ve known since the early ’90s. We both happened to be in the same part of Japan at the same time working for the same company.

On the whole, he’s right. The bucket list is an inane concept. Though we probably differ a bit in that I sometimes visit famed sights in large part because of their fame. What, I wonder, is all the fuss about?

More often than not, the place turns out to be famed for good reasons, and even if it’s something everyone everywhere knows about, you can still take something novel away from the experience. Take the Eiffel Tower, for instance. Can’t very well go to Paris for the first time and not visit that. As we sat directly underneath it, I thought, wow, this is a hell of a metal sculpture.

And there are places I’d visit in preference to others. That seems only reasonable. Iceland, say, rather than Bayonne, NJ. But if I never make it to Iceland? So it goes. Life is short, the world is large. Can’t go everywhere.