My Life List at 30

I turned 30 last year and got married as well - both pretty big milestones which got me reflecting on the rest of my life. What do I want to do with it? That reflection turned into this page, which is sort of like a mix between a bucket list, or goals list. For now I’m calling it my “life list” - a list of the things I’d like to do with my life.

I don’t really have strong plans for most of the things on the list below, but I liked the idea of having it written down somewhere, and it’s fun to dream about the possibilities. I might end up changing my mind on a lot of these but even so, it would be interesting to look back and see how my interests or priorities change over time as well.

🏋️‍♀️ Physical fitness

Looking after my body is the most important thing I can do, since there’s no point having this list at all without the physical capacity to do it. This feeling was reinforced when I read the book Outlive last year - the strength and fitness gains you make today are really an investment into your later life.

Strength

• Bench press 20kg dumbbells: I peaked at 14kg early in 2025, but had to drop back down to 12kg after some time off from the gym
• Do a pull-up: this sounds cool

Ideally I would be working out my entire body and I do have a 4-day gym routine for this, but on weeks I only go once or twice (i.e. most weeks) I just end up doing my arms. For some reason I like the idea of having strong arms so that’s really the only specific goal I have at the moment, but more generally I would like to be “strong” since that’s just a generally useful skill to have.

Running

• Run 5km in 30mins (6min/km): best I could do in 2025 was a 7min-ish pace
• Do a half marathon in 2 hours: I did one once when I was 21 in 2.5 hours (it was a struggle)
• Reach a VO2 max of 48: my Apple Watch currently puts me at 39.9
• Try trail running and participate in a UTMB event (a short one)

The running goals I’ll admit are pretty lame, but I’m just naturally not a very good runner, so even being able to hit 6 minute kilometres would be pretty big for me.

The VO2 max one is quite specific, but the author of Outlive recommends shooting for the “elite” level in your age range.

Appearance

• Maintain 60kg

Weight is a bit of a contentious one to put as a goal. Thinking about dieting makes me gain weight, since the idea of not being “allowed” to eat sweets just makes me want to eat them even more. The only way weight comes off is if I happen to be living happier/healthier and the weight just drops off without me realising it. Which is what happened in 2025 and I entered 2026 at 60kg. I feel really good at this weight, and this puts my BMI at the middle of the “normal” range for my height so I’d like to stay around here if possible.

The rest of the categories on this page aren’t in any specific order (it was too hard to rank them).

⛰️ Hiking

Hiking sort of falls into the exercise category, but I think it deserves its own little spot since it is one of my primary hobbies at the moment. I have two main goals here:

• Climb all of the 100 Famous Mountains of Japan: in 2025 I climbed my 66th, Mt Kaikoma
• Climb all the 100 Famous Mountains of Yamanashi: in 2025 I climbed my 41st which was also Mt Kaikoma (the 100 famous of Japan and Yamanashi have a fair bit of overlap)

I climbed 66 of the hyakumeizan in 3.5 years, which included some 3-day hikes (with friends) and a couple of overnight solo hikes. I used to have grand plans on climbing them all within 5 years, but now I’ve become more content to slowly complete them at my own pace. Writing my hiking blog has also been a really fulfilling hobby for me, so even if I hike something more local or “easy”, being able to put up a blog sharing it with everyone makes me pretty happy.

One of the great things about hiking is there is no one way to enjoy it. You can go solo or with your friends/family/dog, you can do day hikes or overnight hikes, and spend a night in a mountain hut or carry a tent up to the peak yourself and sleep in it. And of course, there are mountains all over the world to explore! So for me hiking is less about continuing to increase my skill level and hike “harder” mountains, but more just about continuing to experience new ways and places to hike. I definitely have no interest in hiking Mt Everest, that’s for sure.

🧠 Language Learning

This is a fairly straightforward section, but language learning is always one of those things that I can start off on but never have been able to stick with. Finding the motivation to do it is hard, but being multilingual would be such a useful skill to have.

Reach fluency in Japanese

• Complete Wanikani level 60: in 2025 I reached 45, before I stopped doing it
• Regularly read books in Japanese: I think I might have read 1 or 2 in 2025?
• Pass the JLPT N2 and N1
• Pass the Kanji kentei tests

Reach conversational Mandarin

• Complete Pimsleur: in 2025 I got close to halfway, but I wasn’t finding I was retaining things as well as I would like, and I dropped off
• Complete Hanzihero
• Pass the HSK 3

🎨 Art and Creativity

If I think of all the possible things I could do in life, art for me is this huge untouched area where I don’t do any of it, but I wish I did. Especially in this age of AI, coding and writing might become obsolete but the bots can’t take physical art away from us (at least, not yet). So I think it’s something worth investing my time in.

• Pottery
• Quick sketching / watercolour: like climbing a peak of a mountain and then drawing the scenery
• Sewing my own clothes: would be actually pretty useful
• Knitting
• Being able to write beautiful kanji: my Japanese writing is like a 5 year-old’s
• Lino printing
• Paper tole
• Drawing art onto a blank postcard, and then sending it to someone: I sent a regular postcard to someone recently, and I thought it would be pretty cool if you could send someone your own art instead
• Baking/cooking: a little bit different to the rest on this list, but being able to make beautiful tasty dishes is a skill in itself, and a useful one too
• Learn more pieces on the piano: I can already play, but I never do
• Get better at photography: I don’t know what “better” entails exactly, but I got a camera in 2025

It’s a long list, but I’m only a third of the way through my life (hopefully) so I have plenty of time left to try things out.

✨ Other skills

I suppose this category is like a miscellaneous “maybe I could make money from this” section.

• Write and publish a book: Something hiking-related would probably be the easiest but becoming a fiction author would be pretty cool.
• Grow my blog readership to 1 million page views a year: in 2025, I reached around 200k page views
• Branch out my social media into short hiking videos: ideally with a dog for maximum cuteness. Need to adopt a dog first!
• Release and develop an app or product that is used by other people: working on Hardcover is scratching that itch for me at the moment

🏡 Lifestyle

A bit of a random category, but these are sort of things where I’m like “I probably need a house first”.

• Buy a home: undecided on whether we stick with a large apartment, or get a proper house
• Grow my own fruit and veg in a garden
• Rescue / foster dogs (ideally Shibas): first I’d like to adopt a dog to keep. But later on (if I had a big enough house) I’d love to help out one of the adoption organisations in Japan by fostering as well
• Buy an electric drum kit so I can play Gitadora / DrumMania at home

I used to have a lot of fun playing DrumMania (like the drum equivalent of DDR) when I lived nearer to an arcade, and I could play songs around a rating of 6 like this one. But a drum kit is pretty loud (and also takes up a fair bit of space) so I think that would need a freestanding house.

💵 Finances

• Be able to FIRE by 40, or maybe even at 36

Being able to FIRE (i.e. having enough savings to retire and live off of the interest) has been a goal of mine since probably my early 20s. I’ve always made sure to save at least half of my after-tax income, and so I’m currently on track to FIRE before 40. Having a tech job that pays a good salary, and now living in Japan where the cost of living is a bit lower has also helped.

However, I’m also keeping in mind that any big life change (family, illnesses, pets and so on) could change my financial goals, or impact how much I’m able to save. Or if I happened to be doing a job I really loved at 40, then I would have no reason to quit. So this goal is more just around continuing to save so I have that flexibility to decide what I want to do with my life in the future.

Overall though, the FIRE goal is a pretty important one. A lot of the things on this long, long list are with the assumption that I will be able to FIRE and have that free time to spend on all of these things.

🫶 Family and social

I finished writing this page, and realised it’s all very me-focused. Maybe that’s okay since this is “my” list, but it did make me pause. I tend to be a bit of an anti-social creature at times, which I don’t think is a very good trait to have. Right now my social meter is mostly filled by my husband (who I love to spend a lot of my downtime with), and I don’t spend as much time with friends or family as I feel like I should.

We are also planning on having children at some point! Which feels like a pretty big thing to leave off of this page considering how huge of an impact that will have on my lifestyle. But also everyone’s fertility journey is different, so it feels weird making strong plans or goals on that front when I don’t really know how things will exactly turn out.

So I don’t have any specific goals for this category right now, but I felt like it was an important enough to warrant mentioning it on this page.

🌏 Travel

Travel feels less important to me so this one is intentionally at the bottom of the list. That’s not to say I don’t travel, since I feel like I do a lot locally in Japan (there’s so much to do here). Also this list is kind of hiking-adjacent since I often want to travel and hike a mountain while I’m at it.

• Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania for my 40th birthday
• Antarctica for my Mum’s 70th
• Mt Olympus, Greece (when I realised this was a real mountain and not just a location in Greek myths I was like cool! I want to climb it)
• Mount Vesuvius, Italy (I have a morbid curiosity with Pompeii)
• Mt Kosciusko, Australia (it is my own country’s highest mountain so I should probably hike it at some point)
• Mt Hallasan, South Korea (highest mountain in Korea, also coincidentally on Jeju Island which I would like to visit)
• A portion of the Pacific Crest Trail (I like the idea of doing this when I’m 60) or some sort of long trail in America. Or even a short trail will do.

In general I would like to try explore nearer to Japan - China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea. Especially since my husband is Chinese, and I’m trying to learn Mandarin, it would be nice to spend a bit of time exploring China and Taiwan’s mountains and hiking culture.

💭 So many things to do…

… that I should actually go and do it, instead of sitting around and thinking about doing it.

Writing this page was a fun exercise, but it’s sort of like when you watch lots of self-help videos or make plans to be productive without actually following through and become productive (which is the hard part).

And funnily, even though this blog of mine is one of my primary hobbies it only warranted a 1-line mention on the page. Although writing on this blog doesn’t have many goals tied to it, I think it will be the thing to tie everything together. I like the idea of trying a lot of different things and blogging about them, plus my journey along the way.

Let’s see how the next 5 or 10 years pan out 👋