Our lives are controlled by external factors. When we fail to anticipate this, we suffer. The ancient Stoics were acutely aware of this. In fact, they developed an epithet for practitioners of Stoicism to keep at arm’s length to remember this crucially important concept: premeditatio malorum. This Latin phrase literally means ‘the pre-meditation of evils’. In more common language, it means anticipating what could go wrong. Given the random nature of the universe, which is entirely indifferent to you and your plans, premeditatio malorum is more than just a phrase. It’s a tactical practice which helps us develop better plans and respond rationally when things don’t go as planned. It’s the deliberate pondering of what could go wrong, but it’s also a firm sense of gratitude for when things go well.
This practice is not meant to foster anxiety or worry. Rather, it’s meant to promote preparedness and resilience against life’s inevitable vicissitudes. Premeditatio malorum is more than just a statement to post on our walls. It’s a practice to undertake before engaging with the external world. It’s not only an attempt to identify obstacles, but also a reminder that we have the inner resources to deal with them. In this post, we’ll explore the Stoic concept of premeditatio malorum by examining its utility for drafting better plans. We’ll discuss how failing to anticipate challenges and malevolence sets us up for unpleasant surprises. When we’re caught off guard, we react with emotion and delay or miss our chance to rebound quickly.
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Negative visualization
Modern Stoics describe premeditatio malorum as a negative visualization exercise. We hear a lot, in sports and performance psychology, for example, about positive visualization. There is some evidence to support the well-established idea that visualizing the process and steps required to succeed in a given activity actually leads to higher likelihood of success. But this is also true for negative visualization. In business, they call this a pre-mortem. Before kicking off a new project or initiative, stakeholders simply imagine all the possible negative outcomes and work backwards to identify the causes of these imagined failures. There’s a reason why major companies spend time and therefore money to do this. It helps them avoid potential pitfalls. It increases the likelihood of success.
As individuals, we can practice Stoic negative visualization for our big projects, too. But we can also practice it on a smaller scale. If someone cuts us off in traffic or interrupts us rudely in a meeting, we only react viscerally because we had failed to remind ourselves beforehand that although most people are not malevolent, people are generally much more preoccupied with themselves than with us. This is also an effective way of managing expectations when it comes to more intimate relationships. In the morning, when we anticipate that our partner’s needs that day may supersede our own, we are less affected when we have to make personal sacrifices for them.
Premeditatio malorum promotes resilience
Whether we employ premeditatio malorum as a formal, perhaps written exercise before embarking on a new endeavor, or whether we practice in silent meditation in the morning to prepare us for the day ahead, it helps us become more resilient. Resilience is not an unwavering fortitude. Rather, it’s the ability to pick ourselves up and get back into the game quickly after a setback. Having plans B, C, and D is a good thing. But it’s even better if we waste no time wallowing in anger or other toxic emotions when something obstructs Plan A. Therefore, anticipating potential negative outcomes reduces our emotional reactions to them because we’ve already experienced them through deliberate anticipation.
Related: Premeditatio Malorum: 10-Minute Guided Meditation Inspired by Stoicism (YouTube link)
I can’t count how many times I looked back on a situation when I got angry or felt personally injured, and realized later that I didn’t actually care that much about what had happened. It was just the surface of my ego reacting because the situation caught me off guard. In retrospect, in the majority of those situations, if I had just entered into the situation with the awareness that not only could something go wrong, but that also I have the inner strength and self-esteem required to deal with it, I would not have reacted. Instead, I would have responded.
The universe is indifferent to your plans
As a more formal exercise, premeditatio malorum, negative visualization, pre-mortem analysis, or whatever you want to call it, leads to more solid plans. Risk is omnipresent and pervasive. Risk, in and of itself, does not lead to failure. The inability or unwillingness to identify risk and implement action items to mitigate or avoid it is what leads to failure. The same goes for the universe’s indifference towards us. We are all somewhat self-centered. That’s normal. Premeditatio malorum helps us poke our head out from our deeply personal passions and desires (both of which are good in moderation) to anticipate that the world doesn’t care about us. The world’s indifference, or in some rare cases, its malevolence towards us, means that it will not cooperate with us and it certainly will not bend to our will. Life happens through us, not to us.
Develop your plans naturally. Don’t let negative visualization obstruct your vision or creativity. But once you’ve created your plans, with all your zeal, ambition, and creativity, take some time to critically analyze them. Try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Perhaps imagine how a competitor or potential investor would view your plans. What risks or challenges do your plans present for other people involved? Ask yourself a series of ‘what if?’ questions and develop contingencies. Write a list of assumptions related to your plan and try to challenge each of them. Try to zoom out from your plan, moving out from under the trees and examine the whole forest from above to put your plan into a wider perspective.
Premeditatio malorum fosters gratitude
Practices like these will help you identify some potential obstacles and challenges, but not all of them. The final part of the exercise is recognizing with humility that you did your best to look around every corner, but ultimately, the world is unpredictable. In the end, know with confidence that you’re armed with the recognition that things will be hard, but that you have the inner resources to deal with anything.
Finally, in addition to better plans and more rational responses to unexpected obstacles, the concept of premeditatio malorum teaches us to be grateful for all that is relatively good. Sometimes things do go our way, and for this we should be immensely grateful. Having anticipated challenges and being fortunate enough to have not met them is extra sweet. Having anticipated challenges and then having met and overcome them is even sweeter. Ultimately, it’s a classic case of putting things into perspective. We can view past, present, and future successes as precious because we know that things can and sometimes do go differently.
“Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation, nor do all things turn out for him as he wished but as he reckoned—and above all he reckoned that something could block his plans.”
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