38 million obituaries written over 30 years reveal how society defines a life well lived

What can we learn from reading 38 million obituaries written over three decades?

Kyle Law is a post-doctoral researcher in the Intergenerational Decisions and Effective Action Lab in Arizona State University's School of Sustainability and was part of a team that did just that.

The resulting study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and gives insight into what families value, and how big world events can change that.

He joined The Show to talk more about the research.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Kyle, you and your colleagues looked at these millions of obituaries written between 1998 and 2024, what were you trying to figure out with this project?

KYLE LAW: Yeah. So basically we treated obituaries as kind of a cultural record. And we were asking a simple question: When families have just a few lines to capture a life, what values do they highlight?

And we used a well-established values framework from psychology and then used language analysis tools to quantify how often different values showed up and how that changed over time and across regions. And around major events like 9/11, the financial crisis and COVID.

So really we wanted to know, how does society define a life well lived?

BRODIE: Well, and it seems as though in many ways society defines a life well lived as maybe being a traditional one or having upheld some kind of tradition.

LAW: Yeah, that’s right. So across tens of millions of obituaries, the most consistent ingredients of what it means to have lived well were tradition, so often expressed through faith and community and longstanding customs and benevolence. So meaning caring for close others. Achievement and power appeared, but much less. So obituaries seem to be less about status and more about relationships.

BRODIE: Well, and it seems like in terms of relationships, being a good person almost seemed to be a pretty big component of this.

LAW: Yeah, that really struck me that across 30 years, the most consistent values that were highlighted and the dominant value profile was tradition and benevolence, those relationships with close others.

BRODIE: Now interestingly you mentioned that things like achievement and power, that sort of thing, like didn’t really come up that much. But you also found that in the obituaries for men, they tended to come up more frequently, is that right?

LAW: Yeah. So, men’s obituaries did emphasize achievement and power more than women’s, whereas women’s emphasized benevolence and hedonism. Older adults were linked more to tradition, while younger adults tended to be memorialized for universalism and self-direction.

And this isn’t about individual essence, but rather how the language we use to define a life well lived reflects cultural scripts around gender and age. So those stereotypes we have in life about what it means to live well as a man or an older person are carried over into how we memorialize a life.

BRODIE: So, you alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically, how did specific events in the world affect all of this?

LAW: Yeah, so after 9/11, we saw a noticeable uptick in language related to tradition and benevolence. And we saw that especially in New York. So in plain terms, memorials more often emphasize things like faith; religious community; longstanding rituals; and being devoted to family and close others. And one way to think about that is that in the wake of a collective threat, people often lean harder on the institutions and the relationships that create stability and meaning.

After the 2008 financial crisis, we saw the opposite pattern for achievement. References to accomplishment and status markers dropped relative to prior years. And I don’t think this means that people stopped achieving, but I think it means that how families chose to summarize a life during this period of economic destabilization, achievement became less central to that story.

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BRODIE: People were maybe a little more quiet about either the financial or other achievements that people had gotten during their lives.

LAW: I think that’s right. Yeah, I think during a time period when people are tightening their belts, it might look tacky to talk about how much time somebody spent on their boat. ... So the broader pattern here is that cross crises don’t just change daily life, but they change how communities publicly highlight what is meaningful in death.

BRODIE: Well, so what do you make of all of this? What does this tell us?

LAW: First off, it’s descriptive. It’s not prescriptive. It shows what families highlight when memory is on the line. And I think that’s useful for understanding cultural priorities and also promoting reflection on one’s own legacy.

But I do think there’s value in highlighting to people what gets preserved in memory while they’re alive. So people often focus on things like achievement and power while they’re living.

And when people talk about how they want to be remembered, they typically highlight one of two things. They either highlight merely that they want their reputation to live on after death, or that they want to be remembered specifically for making the world better. And what we find here in obituaries is that these two things are actually pretty aligned.

What people are remembered for is the good they did for others. And I’m interested in testing whether highlighting that fact can get people to try to do more good while they’re living.

BRODIE: Well, so one of the things that I found so interesting about this research is that, by and large — I won’t say always, but generally — obituaries are written by family members, survivors, friends of the person who has died. And there’s always a question of is there a little bit of — I don’t want to say exaggeration — but maybe more emphasis on the kinds of things that maybe will look good to others in terms of being a good family person or volunteering or attending religious services or sort of the good works they did, as opposed to maybe how they actually lived their lives in some cases.

So I wonder if what you read and what these obituaries said maybe spoke to the fact that these are the values that are generally seen as being ones that we strive for — whether or not we actually get there.

LAW: I think that’s right on. I think that what obituaries aren’t going to tell you is how somebody actually lived 100% of the time. What they will tell you is what society values as what it means to do life well. So they are these aspirational principles, but maybe not whether or not the person we’re writing about got there.

They are written by loved ones. They’re generally positive and rarely negative. So, I think there’s a limitation in that, where we’re not going to be able to tell how somebody actually lived. But it’s also a strength of this type of data that we can find out what is valued most in life.

BRODIE: This might be a little bit beyond the scope of your research, but I’m wondering about sort of the quantity of obituaries. Just because as newspapers shrink and shrink — and obituaries are not inexpensive to put in a newspaper — I wonder if like if you’re getting sort of a self selecting group of people and maybe values because not everybody is choosing to or can afford to or has a place to place an obituary when a loved one dies.

LAW: I think that’s right. So obituaries don’t capture all Americans equally. And writing norms vary across groups, and language only partially reflects a person’s life.

But I think as obituaries are becoming more centralized to online sources like Legacy.com, where the costs are somewhat lower, hopefully over time we’ll see better representation across groups. But I do think that this is a limitation of the work that certain groups are being written about more, partially because there is this barrier to writing one where it costs quite a bit to publish one in a newspaper.

But I also hope that going forward we’ll be able to see more representation as they become cheaper to publish and more centrally located online versus in print.