The year of crisis. You could say that about last year. But you are still here. Figuring things out. After everything the past years threw at you. The uncertainty, the volatility, the systemic collapse. You made it through. You have every right to be anxious about what's happening in the world right now. Or what ai could do to your career. Anxiety is a feeling of dread. Tied to a danger that doesn't exist in the present. You know what that means? You're suffering from a future no one can control. Most of what we do to prepare for the future. Refreshing news feeds. Doom-scrolling and running worst-case scenarios in our heads. Does not prepare us. It just prolongs the suffering. We rehearse our fears.
The stoics had a better idea for this.
Two thousand years ago, Seneca sat down each morning and tried to figure out everything that could go wrong that day. Marcus Aurelius, ruler of the roman empire, did the same. They called it "premeditatio malorum," the premeditation of evils. The practice of deliberately visualising what could go wrong. Your project fails. A client walks away. The economy tanks hard. Energy wars take on a whole new level at our expense. AI becomes the default for companies. And your role disappears. Think through the specific details. But the most important question is this.
What would you do?
Practically, can you rehearse your response?
The stoics wanted us to go from "this will happen, and it will ruin me," to "this could happen. I'm thinking through it now, calmly, before I'm in the middle of it." That second thought is "premeditatio." The first one paralyses you. Anxiety is worse with vagueness. The imagined fear of "something bad" is always worse than a specific, named threat. When you bring a potential crisis into focus. You lose this client, ai replaces your job, or the oil market collapses. It loses the quality that makes it terrifying: the unknown.
Seneca wrote to a friend:
"If an evil has been pondered beforehand, the blow is gentle when it comes. To the fool, however, and to him who trusts in fortune, each event as it arrives 'comes in a new and sudden form', and a large part of evil, to the inexperienced, consists in its novelty. This is proved by the fact that men endure with greater courage, when they have once become accustomed to them, the things which they had first regarded as hardships. Hence, the wise man accustoms himself to coming trouble, lightening by long reflection the evils which others lighten by long endurance. We sometimes hear the inexperienced say: 'I knew that this was in store for me.' But the wise man knows that all things are in store for him. Whatever happens, he says: 'I knew it'. — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 76.34–35
Pre-suffering is optional.
Preparation is not.
Marcus Aurelius practised this daily. A man commanding an army, managing an empire during plague and war, still sat each morning and meditated on what could be taken from him. His health. His power. The people he loved. When those losses eventually came, and they did, he met them from a place of calm. He'd already done the "premeditatio" work.
You can try it with this two-column exercise.
Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.
On the left, write down what could go wrong right now. Be specific. AI tools displace your core skill set. Your company restructures. A health scare derails everything. Name each one. Sit with it for a minute. Think through what you'd actually do. And write it down. Be specific for each scenario. What's your practical response? On the right, write down what you have right now. Your skills, relationships, knowledge and the fact that you've already survived several things you thought might break you. The left column builds resilience. The right column builds perspective. Together, they give you a mind that can hold difficulty without being destroyed by it.
This changes our worries about ai and everything else.
The concerns are legitimate. But right now, most of that worry is a cloud of anxiety about disruption in general. About being left behind, not knowing what's coming. Premeditatio gives you a way in. Sit down and think it through. What specifically could ai replace in your work? Which tasks? Which skills become less valuable, and which become more? If that happened in two years, what would you do? What would you learn? Who would you talk to? What would the transition look like?
When you run that scenario deliberately, two things happen.
First, you realise you have more options than anxiety lets you see. Second, you discover that the scenario, while difficult, is survivable. You've just lived through it in your mind. And you came out the other side. That's the stoic mindset. You prepare for the future by thinking through it, clearly, in advance, until the fear turns into a plan. Marcus Aurelius ruled through plague, war, and betrayal. Seneca lost most of what he had. They were unbreakable because they had already, in an internal way, made peace with the possibility. You can do the same. By taking time to think through what you're afraid of, specifically, and what you would do.
The crisis you're dreading may never come.
But the person you become by preparing for it, deliberately, is harder to shake. That person continues to live, regardless. You're still here. The point now is to build yourself into someone who will still be here, no matter what comes next. Most people will read something like this and think: yes, that makes sense. Then they go back to refreshing their feeds. That gap between understanding an idea and using it is where most good intentions die.
Learn to close it.
Premeditatio is a practice. The difference is the same as knowing how to swim versus getting in the water. One is knowledge. The other builds the muscle. But sitting down to deliberately imagine bad outcomes feels counterintuitive. You are meant to be positive. Or keep your energy high. Stoic practice runs in the opposite direction. The philosophers want you to look directly at what you'd rather avoid. The discomfort is the point. You're training yourself to face hard things and keep your composure at the same time. You can't build that muscle by thinking comfortable thoughts.
Premeditatio applies to other irritations in life, too. You can practice it first thing in the morning. Before you open your phone, you take five minutes. Pick one thing you're anxious about. One specific thing, not "the future" or "everything," but one thing of concern. Your job security. A relationship challenge. A project that could fail. Now think it through. Not what if this goes wrong. But say this goes wrong. Then what? Walk yourself through the sequence. What do you lose? What do you still have? What's your first move? Your second? Then stop. Write down one thing you're grateful for that you might otherwise overlook. As a genuine act of noticing.
Be thankful for those.
And make peace with how you will deal with your problems if and when they come. Stop treating the many ways things could go wrong as unthinkable. Think about them. You will survive the process. And the options will have less power over you.
Marcus Aurelius' "premeditatio" on people who irritate you. He wrote;
"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness — all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature's law — and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction."
For everything that bothers, irritates, frustrates or takes over your mind unnecessarily, you can extract what's useful from it and then let it go. Most people worry. They circle the same thought repeatedly, looking for an exit that isn't there. Premeditatio is structured preparation. It takes the anxiety, something bad might happen and converts it into something you can actually use. Seneca said, He who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive." The emotional power of anything your fear its power to catch you off guard.
When you've already walked through it in your mind. Or you've already asked, then what? and found answers, the experience loses that charge. It becomes something you've already, in some sense, survived.
Premeditatio makes you more present.
When you know you've thought through the worst, you stop holding onto it unconsciously. The practice makes stoics present to all their experiences. Because they've already reckoned with losing. It doesn't eliminate uncertainty. Nothing does. But it will change your relationship to it, and that changes everything. You're still here. You adapted before. The stoics would say that wasn't luck. That was the beginning of a practice.
Now you make it deliberate.