A good life is typically conceptualized as a happy or meaningful life. Recent studies have suggested a third facet: the psychologically rich life, characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. In the current project, we introduce obituaries as a complementary and informative data source to (a) replicate happiness, meaning, and psychological richness as three robust and ubiquitous facets of a good life. We then (b) explore the role of life events, affect, and life domains in constituting a happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich life. To do so, we gather and analyze 333 newspaper obituaries (Study 1), and 1,200 obituaries from an online gravesite collection (Study 2). Combining expert ratings with natural language processing, we (a) replicate previous findings that people agree on what is a happy, meaningful, or psychologically rich life, that obituaries and, thus, lives vary in their happiness, meaning, and psychological richness, and that the three facets are related but distinct. We further find (b) that life events primarily contribute to a psychologically rich life. We also find that positive affect is conducive to all three facets of a good life, while negative affect is only conducive to psychological richness. Regarding life domains, we find that work is positively related to meaning and psychological richness, while private life is negatively related to the two facets. Overall, our paper further establishes (a) psychological richness as a robust third facet of a good life and (b) life events, affect, and life domains as important contributing factors.
