Use the eulogy / future-self lens

Imagine how you’d want to be remembered to reveal the values you’d defend most.

Why it works

Picturing your eulogy or your eighty-year-old self collapses short-term noise and surfaces what you’d actually want to have stood for. The long view strips out status games and momentary wants, exposing the values that survive distance. What you’d want said about you is a clean signal of what you most deeply value.

How to do it

1. Imagine someone who knew you well describing how you lived — what would you want them to truthfully say?
2. Note the qualities and priorities that appear; those point to core values.
3. Compare them to how you currently spend your days and mark the gaps.

Evidence

Perspective-broadening and future-self exercises appear across reflective and clinical practice as elicitation tools. This is a structured reflection method, not an intervention with its own outcome trials. (anecdotal)

A useful elicitation device drawn from practice; no specific evidence that the eulogy framing outperforms other ways of surfacing values.

Common mistake

Listing values that sound admirable to others rather than the ones you’d genuinely want to be true of you — the exercise only works if you answer honestly.