The instruction has a long pedigree. Write your own obituary, or your own eulogy, read back the summed-up verdict of your life, and then set about living so the words come true. Stephen Covey put a version of it near the centre of his famous habits; older traditions had their own memento mori long before the productivity shelf existed. It is easy to file the exercise under motivational theatre and move on. That would be a mistake, because two well-studied lines of psychology suggest it does something real, just not for the reason the packaging claims. The active ingredient is not death. It is a vivid, valued picture of a future self, made concrete enough to change what you do this week.
The future self is a stranger, which is the whole problem
Start with why an ordinary intention to live well so rarely survives contact with a Tuesday. Research led by the psychologist Hal Hershfield has shown that people tend to treat their own future selves rather as they would a stranger. The person who will exist in thirty years is, neurologically and emotionally, someone we struggle to identify with, which is why we happily hand them our unpaid debts, our deferred health, and our someday plans. Hershfield’s work found that the strength of a person’s felt connection to that future self predicts how much they invest in it, and, more tellingly, that the connection can be manipulated. In one experiment, people shown age-progressed digital renderings of their own faces, an older self made suddenly vivid, chose to save more for retirement than those who saw only their current face.
This is the first thing the obituary exercise quietly does. Writing the account of a whole life drags the distant, abstract future self into sharp and specific focus, gives it a face and a verdict, and closes some of the gap that lets us neglect it. You are, in effect, running Hershfield’s manipulation on yourself with a pen, making the person you will have become real enough to feel some obligation towards.
Writing the ideal version down does measurable work
The second mechanism concerns the writing itself, and here the evidence is more direct. In a 2001 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the psychologist Laura King had participants write for twenty minutes a day across four days about one of several topics, including their best possible future self: a concrete imagining of a life in which things had gone as well as they realistically could. Those who wrote about that best possible self showed a measurable rise in subjective well-being, and, five months later, fewer illness visits than controls, all without the emotional cost that came from writing about trauma.
King’s exercise is, in effect, the obituary’s more useful sibling. It asks not how your life will end but how it could go right, and getting that down on paper, moving it from a vague wish to an articulated picture, is itself the intervention. An obituary written in the same spirit, describing not a death but a life fully realised, is a best-possible-self prompt pointed at the far horizon. The benefit comes from the specificity, from having actually named what a life well lived would contain, rather than from the morbid frame around it.
Write the eulogy, not the death certificate
Which brings us to the honest correction the research forces. The part of the exercise that feels most profound, the confrontation with mortality, is the part that does the least reliable work, and can even backfire. A large body of research on what psychologists call terror management theory finds that reminders of death frequently trigger defensive rather than constructive responses: a tightening of existing worldviews, more rigidity, sometimes more hostility to outsiders, rather than a serene resolve to live better. Contemplating your own end is not a dependable engine of virtue. The value in this exercise lives almost entirely in the prospective, values-based half of it, the picture of who you want to have been, and hardly at all in the graveside atmospherics.
So the sharper version of the advice is to write the eulogy and skip the death certificate. Describe the future self in concrete, values-first terms, the relationships tended, the work that mattered, the person others could rely on, and then treat that document not as inspiration but as a specification, something to reverse-engineer into this month’s actual choices. The writing connects you to the future self and clarifies the values; the living is a separate and harder job the page cannot do for you.
What the evidence does and does not settle
A few honest limits belong here. The best-possible-self effect is real but modest, and like much of this literature it has had an uneven time under replication, so it is a useful tool rather than a guaranteed lift. King’s participants were undergraduates, Hershfield’s saving effects are averages across groups rather than promises about any individual, and none of this evidence says that writing anything down reliably changes a life on its own; the document clarifies the direction, it does not walk the road. It is also worth saying plainly that for some people dwelling on their own death is distressing rather than clarifying, and anyone who finds it so should feel free to run the forward-looking, values-based version instead, which is where the benefit sits anyway, and to seek support if such thoughts become heavy.
Within those limits, the old exercise earns its keep. Its real function is not to frighten you with an ending but to convert a distant, easily ignored future self into a specific figure you feel connected to and answerable for. Written well, it hands you a clear picture of the person you would be proud to have been. What it cannot do, and what the phrase “then live it” quietly smuggles in as though it were the easy part, is the living. That remains, as ever, the whole of the work.
