A decade ago Claire Wilmot argued in The Atlantic that public tributes flatten a specific, ugly death into a shareable platitude, and that if you are not close family you should send a private message or pick up the phone, not post. A younger instinct now treats posting, loudly, as how grief actually gets survived: as one linguist told TIME, "as a community, we need to see these expressions in order to recover."
The sharpest finding sits between them. In a 2022 study, mourners read their own posts as a genuine outpouring of grief and assumed everyone else's were attention-seeking. Nobody thinks they are the one performing.
What both eras agree on: defer to the people closest to the loss, on timing and on tone, whether or not you post at all.
