Write Your Own Eulogy
Project forward and describe the life you want to have lived to clarify what matters now
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 82%
Writing your own eulogy is a values-clarification exercise: assuming you live a long life, you project forward and write down how you want to be remembered, the words you'd want people to use to describe you, and the life you want to have lived. The point isn't death, it's the reverse: articulating the life you want reveals your values, who you want to be, and therefore your purpose and ultimate goals. That clarity matters because judging how you currently spend your time is only possible against a destination, and without your own goals you drift into other people's amorphous, extrinsic notions of success, where the goalposts always move and you're never satisfied. For anxious students, Holmes simply reframes it as 'write about the life you want to live,' which is what it was all along. The output then guides how you invest your upcoming hours.
Origin
One of several life-perspective exercises Dr Cassie Holmes assigns in her happiness course and includes in Happier Hour; she reframes it as 'write about the life you want to live' for students who find the death framing anxiety-inducing.
Core principles
- 01You can only judge how you spend time against how you want to spend it
- 02A broad life perspective surfaces what's important over what's merely urgent
- 03Without your own goals you adopt other people's amorphous notions of success
- 04Clarifying values defines your purpose and ultimate goals
- 05This is an exercise about the life you want to live, not about death
How to run it
- 1
Assume a long life and project forward
Imagine you live a full, long life and mentally travel to the end of it before writing anything.
- 2
Write how you want to be remembered
Put down the words you'd want people to use to describe you and the life you'd want to have lived.
Pro tip If the death framing creates anxiety, simply write about 'the life you want to live', it's the same exercise.
- 3
Extract your values and purpose
Read back what you wrote and pull out the values it reveals, who you want to be, and what your ultimate goals are.
- 4
Contrast against how you spend time now
Use the destination to evaluate your current time use, treating it as a subtraction: what gets you toward that life versus what doesn't.
- 5
Redirect upcoming hours
Let the clarified purpose inform how you invest your next hours, aligning day-to-day time with your intrinsic goals.
Watch out Don't adopt generic 'success' as the target; its goalposts always move and it leads to unhappiness.
In the wild
One of Holmes's students refused the assignment, saying thinking about death caused too much anxiety and offering to forfeit the grade. Holmes reframed it: 'Write about the life that you want to live.' That's what the exercise always was, articulating the life you want clarifies your values, who you want to be, and your purpose, which then informs how you spend your upcoming hours.
→ The reframe removed the anxiety while preserving the full clarifying value of the exercise.
Common mistakes
Chasing generic success instead
Without your own articulated goals you default to society's amorphous, extrinsic success, where the reference point always shifts and satisfaction never arrives.
Treating it as morbid rather than clarifying
Fixating on the death framing misses the point; it's a life-vision exercise and can be reframed as one.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone lacking a clear sense of purpose or feeling they're chasing goals that aren't truly theirs.
Not ideal for
People for whom explicit mortality framing triggers anxiety, unless reframed as a life-vision exercise.
From the transcript
“one of them, for instance, is writing your eulogy... projecting forward, assuming you live a long life, and writing down, how do you want to…”
“it's not a exercise about death, it's about what life do you want to live? And writing that down and articulating clarifies what's important, what…”
From the episode
How To Manage Your Time For A Happier Life - Dr Cassie Holmes - #547
Dr Cassie Holmes