Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing What Could Go Wrong

By Gio White·How sources are checked

In AD 64 the city of Lyon burned down overnight. Seneca wrote to a friend about it and the letter is not really about the fire. It is about the fact that everyone was surprised.

Nothing ought to be unexpected by us, he writes in Letter 91. Our minds should be sent out ahead to meet every possibility, and we should think not of what usually happens but of what can happen. The city that stood for a hundred years was gone in a night, and the only people wrecked by it were the ones who had never once considered that it might be.

This is premeditatio malorum: the premeditation of adversity. It is the most practically useful exercise in Stoicism and the most easily misunderstood, because at a glance it looks exactly like the thing it is designed to cure.

What it is not

It is not worry. Worry is involuntary, circular, and open-ended. It returns to the same fear repeatedly without ever resolving it, and it produces physical distress with no output. Premeditation is deliberate, bounded, and finishes with a plan. You choose the difficulty, you rehearse the response, you stop.

The tell is what happens at the end. If you feel finished, you were premeditating. If you feel wound up, you were worrying with a classical name on it.

It is not catastrophizing. Catastrophic thinking escalates: the meeting goes badly, so the project fails, so you lose the job, so you lose the house. Premeditation stays at the level of the actual plausible event and asks a specific question about your conduct within it. The meeting goes badly. What does a person of good character do next?

It is not pessimism. The Stoics are not predicting the fire. They are noting that fires happen, that this one will not consult you first, and that the only variable you control is whether it finds you already having thought about it.

It is not for people who are already anxious about a specific thing. This is the honest caveat most articles omit. If you are currently in the grip of a genuine anxiety spiral about an event, rehearsing it deliberately is not obviously helpful and may not be the right tool that day. The exercise is preventive, aimed at difficulties you are not currently afraid of. Used on an active fear it can become the fear wearing a robe.

Where it comes from

The practice runs through the whole tradition.

Seneca, Letter 91 — the Lyon fire, and the argument that misfortune weighs most heavily on those it surprises.

Seneca, Letter 107 — nothing should be unexpected by us, alongside his image of the willing being led by fate and the unwilling being dragged.

Seneca, Letter 18 — the physical version. Set aside some days, he tells Lucilius, on which you eat the plainest food and wear the roughest clothes, and ask yourself: is this what I was afraid of? Practicing the loss is how you find out its actual size.

Epictetus, Enchiridion 21 — let death and exile and everything that appears terrible be daily before your eyes, and you will never think a mean thought or desire anything excessively.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II.1 — the most concrete instance in the literature, and the reason the exercise is not only about disasters. He begins the day by telling himself that he will meet the meddling, the ungrateful and the arrogant, that they are like this because they cannot tell good from evil, and that none of them can implicate him in ugliness. That is a premeditation about a Tuesday, not about a catastrophe.

Marcus is the model worth copying. Most days do not contain fires. They contain difficult colleagues.

Why it works

Two mechanisms, and the Stoics articulated the first one clearly.

It removes the shock. For the Stoics the distress caused by an event is not in the event but in the judgment we attach to it, and a large part of that judgment is this should not be happening. Having already considered that it could happen dissolves the shock, which is often the larger half of the suffering. The thing still hurts. It no longer also astonishes.

It converts a decision into a retrieval. In the moment, upset, you improvise badly. If you have already decided what a person of good character does when this arrives, you are executing a plan rather than composing one under load. This is the same reason pilots rehearse failures rather than reading about them.

Modern psychology has arrived at neighboring ideas — defensive pessimism as a strategy that works for some people, implementation intentions and their effect on follow-through — without needing the Stoic frame. The convergence is interesting but the practice does not depend on it.

How to do it

Five minutes, in the morning, before the day starts.

Name one specific plausible difficulty. Today, not in general. "A difficult conversation with my manager," not "conflict at work." Specificity is what makes a rehearsal possible.
Say what would actually happen. Concretely and at real scale. Not the escalation, the event.
Ask what a person of good character does. This is the operative question and the reason the exercise is Stoic rather than merely prudent. Not what would make this go away, not what would win. What would a person you respect do here.
Note what is not yours. Their reaction, the outcome, whether it is fair. Naming those explicitly is what stops step 3 turning into strategizing about things you cannot move.
Stop. This is the discipline. One difficulty, one rehearsal, close the notebook. Returning to it repeatedly is worry, and you have already done the useful part.

The version worth doing weekly

Once a week, go bigger, in Seneca’s mode rather than Marcus’s. Choose something you are quietly relying on: your income, your health, a relationship, the city not burning down. Consider that it is not guaranteed. Sit with it for two minutes without deciding anything.

Two things reliably happen. The fear turns out to have a size, which is smaller than the unexamined version. And you find you are more grateful for the thing than you were ten minutes ago, which the Stoics regarded as the same exercise viewed from the other end.

What it is not

Where it comes from

Why it works

How to do it

The version worth doing weekly

Further reading