Premeditatio malorum, as Seneca taught it

What the phrase means

The phrase is two Latin words, and the first is a compound.

Put together: rehearsing bad things before they happen. Meditatio is not meditation in the modern sense of quieting the mind; it is what a speaker does before a speech, going over the thing in advance. And “evils” means misfortunes, not wickedness: Seneca’s examples include exile, poverty, illness and the death of people we love (Consolation to Marcia 9; On Tranquility of Mind 11).

Strictly, the Stoics did not count those as evils at all. For them the only real evil is acting badly, and poverty or illness, though we naturally avoid them, cannot make anyone a worse person (see preferred indifferents). Part of what the practice does is let you see that before the misfortune arrives.

Spelling. Classical Latin writes praemeditatio. Premeditatio is the later spelling, from the medieval habit of writing ae as e, and it is the form most people now use.

Where the label comes from. No Stoic uses premeditatio malorum as the name of an exercise. The closest ancient wording is Cicero’s: in the Tusculan Disputations (45 BC) he writes that the praemeditatio futurorum malorum, the premeditation of future evils, softens their arrival when you have seen them coming from far off (3.29). Cicero, who was not a Stoic, credits the idea to the Cyrenaics, another school (3.28–31). Seneca, writing some eighty years later, put it in his own words. The two-word label is a later shorthand.

How to pronounce it

Stress the syllables in capitals:

• Classical Latin: prai-meh-dih-TAH-tee-oh mah-LOH-rum
• Church (Italian-style) Latin: preh-meh-dee-TAHT-see-oh mah-LOH-rum
• In English conversation: pree-med-ih-TAH-tee-oh mah-LOR-um is fine

In every version the stress falls on ta and lo.

What Seneca wrote

Seneca comes back to this idea in several works. One of the clearest statements is in the Consolation to Marcia, written around AD 40 to a woman who had been mourning her son for three years. Partway through, he takes up the question of why loss hits as hard as it does.

His argument has three steps. The evidence is all around us: funerals pass our doors, and rich men go broke in front of us. We don’t apply it to ourselves; just before this passage, Seneca says we imagine our own road to be less dangerous than other people’s (Consolation to Marcia 9, in our words). So when the blow comes, it comes as a surprise, and the surprise makes the collapse worse. “I never thought it would happen!” is the sound of that belief breaking.

Notice what he does not promise. A foreseen blow “falls much less heavily”; it still falls, and grief still comes. What foresight spares you is the protest on top of the loss, the feeling that the world has broken a promise it never made. Seneca’s other essays of comfort are covered under the consolations.

The fire at Lugdunum

Seneca returns to the theme in Letter 91 to Lucilius, after a fire destroyed the Roman city of Lugdunum, now Lyon, and left their friend Liberalis, who loved the place, badly shaken. English translations of the Letters are not public domain everywhere, so here is the app’s labeled paraphrase:

The detail Seneca keeps returning to is speed: one night between a great city and none at all. If a city can go that fast, so can a job, a business or a person’s health. His advice in the letter is to send the mind ahead to meet whatever can happen, not only what usually does (Letter 91, in our words).

Storms before sailing

In On Tranquility of Mind, Seneca makes the same point with a sailor’s image and a line from the playwright Publilius Syrus, a line he also quotes to Marcia:

The last sentence is the practical reason to do this in advance: “It is too late to school the mind” (On Tranquility of Mind 11) once the bad news has come. When the phone rings, you will meet it with the beliefs you already hold.

Expect everything

The practice isn’t only for disasters. In On Anger, Seneca ties a good deal of everyday anger to being caught off guard, and the first sentence of this passage says why:

“Think of everything, expect everything” (On Anger 2.31) covers the colleague who misses the deadline and the contractor who doesn’t show up on Tuesday. None of it is rare, and being ready for it lets you deal with the problem instead of the outrage. The same chapter has a ship’s pilot who never lets out all his canvas without the tackle for shortening sail at hand (2.31, in our words). There is more in the Stoics on anger.

Epictetus: what the preparation is for

Epictetus doesn’t use Seneca’s vocabulary, but for him philosophy itself is this kind of preparation.

Seneca tells you to see the illness coming. Epictetus says what that foresight is for: deciding in advance how you will bear it, the part that is “in your power” (Discourses 3.10). A doctor, he adds in the lines that follow, can forbid you to drink but cannot stop you from bearing thirst well. So a Stoic rehearsal ends not with the disaster but with your own conduct in it, the side of the dichotomy of control that belongs to you.

Practicing it Seneca’s way

Seneca never wrote out a procedure. What follows is built from the moves in the passages above, in our words. It takes a few minutes, in your head or in a notebook.

Start at other people’s houses. Seneca’s evidence is always what has already happened nearby. Begin there: the friend whose flight home was cancelled on Christmas Eve, the colleague who moved for a job that vanished a year later, the cousin who got the call about her mother’s fall. Then take Publilius’s line personally. None of it was rare, and what happened to them can happen to you.

Find your safe road. Seneca’s complaint is that each of us imagines our own road to be safer than everyone else’s. Find where you are doing that; it usually hides inside a plan. The trip assumes the flights will run. The move across the country assumes the new job will be what the interviews described. Nearly everyone assumes their parents will stay more or less as they are. The cry Seneca quotes makes a good test: where would you hear yourself saying “I never thought it would happen”?

Size it by what happened next door. Your friend’s cancelled flight meant a night in an airport hotel with two tired children, not a ruined Christmas. The colleague whose job vanished had a lean few months and found another. Your cousin’s mother came home from the hospital, and the family began asking whether she should still drive; your father, at seventy-eight, is close to the same conversation. Most of what you find this way is hard but bearable, as Seneca expects. What is truly heavy stays heavy, but it would no longer be news.

Decide what you will do and say. Here Epictetus takes over. He wants you to have, ready in advance, the sentence you will say when the painful thing comes: “It was for this that I exercised myself” (Discourses 3.10). Some of the preparation is practical, in the spirit of Seneca’s pilot: medicine and a change of clothes in the carry-on; something on the calendar every week of your first month in the new city; the talk with your father about what he wants, held while it is still an ordinary talk. Some of it is a judgment you settle now, while you are calm: a cancelled flight is a bad evening, not a ruined trip, and the gate agent is not your enemy.

Stop when it is no longer news. The exercise has done its work when the misfortune would not catch you off guard: you know it can happen and roughly what you would do. If the flight leaves on time, you have lost nothing. If you catch yourself replaying the scene, adding details or checking the flight status every hour, it has turned into worry, and that is the moment to stop. A single sitting before a trip or a move is plenty. A slow change, like a parent’s aging, deserves a fresh look now and then, not a daily one.

How it differs from worry

Worry and premeditatio malorum both look at bad futures; the difference is in how they end. Worry doesn’t end: it circles the same scene, adds details and starts again, and it never asks what is up to you. The practice is chosen, takes its picture of trouble from what has already happened to real people, and finishes with your own conduct.

The objection is old. Epicurus, as Cicero reports him, held that dwelling on misfortunes that may never come turns them into a permanent evil, and advised turning the mind to pleasant things instead (Tusculan Disputations 3.32–33). Cicero replied that nothing dulls grief so well as the lifelong thought that there is nothing that cannot happen (3.34). Both have a point: looking ahead helps only when it stops. If thinking about what could go wrong is hard to switch off, start with the Stoics on worry, and if it is with you most days, talk to a doctor.

The practice is also different from negative visualization, a modern name for picturing the loss of someone or something you love, built on Epictetus (Enchiridion 3 and 11). Negative visualization looks at what you have; premeditatio malorum looks at events that could go wrong, and the negative visualization guide sets the two side by side.

Fear-setting and the Stoics

Fear-setting is the writer Tim Ferriss’s name for a written exercise he described in The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) and set out again in a 2017 TED talk, where he credits Seneca and premeditatio malorum as its inspiration. In the TED version, you take a step you are afraid to take, such as leaving a job, and make three columns: the worst things that could happen (define), how you might prevent each one (prevent), and how you would recover if it happened anyway (repair). Two more pages weigh what an attempt could bring against what not acting would cost over the coming months and years.

The family resemblance is real: both insist on naming the bad outcome precisely. Seneca makes a similar move when he advises Lucilius to suppose that a feared lawsuit goes against him and then measure the harm (Letter 24, in our words). The differences matter too:

• What it is for. Fear-setting helps with risks you choose. Seneca’s practice is mostly about misfortunes nobody chooses: a fire, an illness, a death in the family.
• Where the columns come from. Preventing, repairing and the cost of inaction are modern risk planning: useful, but not from the Stoics.
• What it can leave out. The Stoic question is what part of this is up to you, and whether the worst case would make you a worse person or only a poorer or more embarrassed one.

So fear-setting is Stoic-inspired rather than Stoic, and ending it with Epictetus’s question brings it much closer. For fear in general, see what the Stoics said about fear.

The guided version

The guided Premeditatio Malorum practice in Stoic Practice is part of Premium: a short written exercise for one specific thing ahead of you. So are the guided Fear, Uncertainty and Difficult Decision exercises in I Need Perspective. The closest free step is the Worry exercise, which separates what you know from what you imagine, sorts what is up to you, and ends with one thing to do today.