The Stoics had a practice they called premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of losses. Each morning, you spend a few minutes imagining the things you value most being taken away. The people you love, dying. Your health, gone. Your reputation, ruined. Your work, erased.
This sounds like a recipe for misery. It isn’t.
What it produces, when done honestly, is a specific and useful kind of gratitude — not the forced cheerfulness of “I should be grateful,” but the clear-eyed recognition of what you actually have. The things you take for granted become, briefly, vivid.
Seneca wrote about this constantly. He was one of the wealthiest men in Rome and one of the most rigorous practitioners of imagined poverty. He believed the fear of loss was more corrosive than loss itself — that most suffering wasn’t in events but in anticipation.
The practice worked like inoculation. By visiting the difficult future voluntarily, you reduced its power over your actual present. You stopped living in dread. You stopped white-knuckling what you had.
There’s a related practice in the Tibetan tradition: death meditation. You sit and imagine your own death in detail. The progressive deterioration of the body, the moment of passing, what comes after. Practitioners report that doing this regularly makes them considerably less afraid of dying, and considerably more present to their lives.
Modern psychology has a name for why this works: habituation. We’re wired to respond intensely to novelty and stop responding as familiarity increases. Imagining the bad thing repeatedly habituates you to the idea of it. It loses its sting.
But that’s only part of it.
The deeper function is that it forces honesty. You can’t rehearse the loss of someone you love without recognizing how much they matter to you. The practice strips the unconsciousness off ordinary life and makes you see what’s actually there.
This is what the mystery traditions meant by contemplation of death: not morbidity, but a technology for waking up. The fire in the darkness makes visible what was always there.