Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing Adversity

Premeditatio Malorum: Rehearsing Adversity

The Core Idea

Premeditatio malorum - “the premeditation of evils” - is a Stoic practice of mentally rehearsing potential misfortunes before they occur. Rather than optimistically assuming everything will go well, you deliberately visualize what could go wrong and prepare your response.

The Roman Stoic Seneca wrote: “The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.”

This isn’t pessimism or catastrophizing - it’s practical preparation that builds psychological resilience and reduces suffering when adversity inevitably arrives.

Historical Context

The Stoics recognized a fundamental human tendency: we suffer more from our reactions to events than from the events themselves. By mentally rehearsing difficulties in advance:

1. You reduce shock and panic when they actually occur
2. You prepare rational responses instead of emotional reactions
3. You build confidence that you can handle adversity
4. You appreciate what you have while you still have it

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, began each day with this practice:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”

Not to breed cynicism, but to prepare himself mentally so he wouldn’t be surprised or thrown off course by human nature.

Application for Technical Leaders

For principal engineers and engineering leaders, premeditatio malorum has immediate practical applications:

System Design and Architecture

Before launching a system, visualize:

• What if our primary database fails?
• What if traffic spikes 100x unexpectedly?
• What if our third-party API goes down?
• What if we have a security breach?
• What if our key engineer leaves the team?

This is essentially chaos engineering and disaster recovery planning applied philosophically. By imagining failures, you build resilience into systems.

Example: Instead of optimistically assuming your microservices architecture will work perfectly, pre-meditate:

• “What if service A can’t reach service B?”
• Answer: Implement circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff, and graceful degradation

The practice transforms abstract risks into concrete mitigations.

Career and Projects

Before starting a major project:

• What if funding is cut halfway through?
• What if the technology we chose becomes obsolete?
• What if key stakeholders leave?
• What if requirements change drastically?
• What if the project gets canceled?

By visualizing these scenarios, you:

1. Build in flexibility (modular design, incremental delivery)
2. Prepare emotional resilience (knowing you’ll survive even if project fails)
3. Create contingency plans (alternative paths to value)
4. Avoid over-attachment to specific outcomes

Personal Resilience

As a technical leader:

• What if I get negative feedback from my manager?
• What if my team disagrees with my architectural decision?
• What if I make a mistake that causes an outage?
• What if I don’t get the promotion I’m hoping for?
• What if I lose my job?

Mentally rehearsing these scenarios doesn’t invite them - it prepares you to respond rationally rather than reactively.

How to Practice Premeditatio Malorum

1. Morning Visualization (5 minutes)

At the start of your day, mentally rehearse potential challenges:

For a principal engineer:

• “Today I might face: a production incident, disagreement in design review, a difficult conversation with a direct report, unexpected urgent request from leadership”
• For each: “How will I respond calmly and effectively?”

2. Project Planning (15 minutes)

Before any major initiative:

• List 5-10 things that could go wrong
• For each, determine: likelihood, impact, mitigation, response plan
• This is literally the “Risks” section of any good project proposal

Template:

Potential Adversity: Key engineer leaves mid-project
Likelihood: Medium
Impact: High (3-month delay)
Mitigation: Document architecture decisions, pair programming, knowledge sharing
Response Plan: Reprioritize, hire replacement, possibly adjust scope
Mental Rehearsal: "I can handle this. We'll adapt the plan and still deliver value."

3. Pre-Mortem Exercise (30 minutes)

Before launching a system, hold a “pre-mortem” meeting:

• Scenario: “It’s 6 months from now. Our system failed catastrophically. Why?”
• Team brainstorms all possible failure modes
• Prioritize and address top risks

This group premeditatio malorum builds shared resilience and prevents groupthink.

4. Evening Reflection (5 minutes)

Review what went wrong today:

• Did you anticipate it? If yes, was your preparation helpful?
• If not, add it to tomorrow’s mental rehearsal

Seneca’s practice: Each evening, he reviewed the day’s events and asked:

• “What bad habit did I cure today?”
• “What vice did I resist?”
• “In what way am I better?”

Distinguishing from Anxiety and Catastrophizing

Premeditatio malorum is NOT:

• Rumination: endlessly worrying about the same fears
• Catastrophizing: assuming the worst will definitely happen
• Pessimism: believing things will go badly and there’s nothing you can do

Premeditatio malorum IS:

• Deliberate: intentional, time-boxed practice
• Preparatory: focused on response planning, not just worry
• Empowering: builds confidence in your ability to handle adversity
• Actionable: leads to concrete mitigations

Key difference: After visualizing adversity, you move to problem-solving and preparation, not paralysis.

Real-World Examples

Example 1: The Netflix Chaos Engineering Philosophy

Netflix famously created “Chaos Monkey” - a tool that randomly terminates production instances. This is premeditatio malorum institutionalized:

• Deliberately introduce failures
• Verify systems gracefully degrade
• Build confidence in resilience

Result: When real failures occur, systems and teams are prepared.

Example 2: Bezos’s “Regret Minimization Framework”

Jeff Bezos visualized himself at age 80 looking back on his life:

• “Will I regret not trying this startup idea?”
• By visualizing future regret (a form of adversity), he gained clarity for difficult decisions

Example 3: Deployment Day Preparation

Instead of optimistically assuming a deployment will be smooth:

Pre-meditation:

• “What if the deployment breaks production?”
• Response: Have rollback plan tested and ready
• “What if the new feature causes unexpected load?”
• Response: Deploy feature flag disabled, enable gradually with monitoring
• “What if we discover a critical bug post-deploy?”
• Response: Have hotfix process documented, team on-call prepared

Result: When something goes wrong (and it will), you respond calmly with a plan instead of panicking.

Common Misunderstandings

Misunderstanding 1: “This will make me negative and pessimistic”

Reality: Mentally preparing for adversity actually reduces anxiety. When bad things happen, you think “I prepared for this” rather than “Everything is falling apart.”

Stoic view: The optimist who never considers adversity suffers more when it arrives because they’re unprepared and shocked.

Misunderstanding 2: “I don’t have time for this”

Reality: 5 minutes of mental rehearsal can save hours or days of crisis response. The time investment is minimal; the return is significant.

Misunderstanding 3: “Visualizing bad outcomes will make them happen”

Reality: Imagining adversity doesn’t cause it. Fires don’t start because you have a fire extinguisher. The universe doesn’t punish preparation.

Integration with Engineering Practices

Premeditatio malorum aligns perfectly with established engineering practices:

You’re likely already practicing premeditatio malorum in your engineering work - the philosophy simply extends it to all areas of life.

Balancing Preparation and Presence

A valid concern: “If I’m always thinking about what might go wrong, am I not present?”

The Stoic answer: The practice is time-boxed and intentional. You visualize adversity, prepare your response, then let it go and focus on what’s in front of you.

The goal: When adversity strikes, you respond from preparation rather than panic, then return to presence.

Marcus Aurelius: “Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: ‘What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?’”

Reflection Questions

To deepen this practice:

1. What adversity am I avoiding thinking about because it’s uncomfortable?

   • Often, the scenarios we avoid mentally are the ones we most need to prepare for

2. What past adversity caught me completely off-guard?

   • Could visualization have helped me respond better?
   • What similar scenarios should I prepare for now?

3. What am I currently taking for granted?

   • Your team, your health, your job, your skills
   • How would you adapt if you lost it?

4. When was the last time preparation saved me from a crisis?

   • Reinforce the value of this practice by noting when it works

5. What’s the worst that could realistically happen in my current project/role?

   • And if it did, would I survive? How would I move forward?

Conclusion: From Fear to Confidence

Premeditatio malorum transforms fear into preparedness. By deliberately visualizing adversity:

• You reduce suffering when it arrives
• You build practical resilience into your systems and life
• You appreciate what you have while you have it
• You develop confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes

For principal engineers navigating complexity, uncertainty, and high-stakes decisions, this ancient Stoic practice is remarkably modern and practical.

The paradox: By contemplating what could go wrong, you become more capable of making things go right.

Start today: Spend 5 minutes this evening visualizing tomorrow’s potential challenges. Notice how it changes your response when they actually occur.

As Seneca wrote: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” By choosing when and how to imagine adversity, you take control of your inner life and build unshakeable resilience.