⁴¹Likewise, Seneca (Letters to Lucilius, 49.10) proposes “Say to me when I lie down to sleep: ’You may not wake again!’ And when I have waked: ’You may not go to sleep again!’. It is easy to see why contemplation of death would reduce desires, and in particular planning and intentions. Presumably, contemplation of death reminds you that you just might die tomorrow, even if that is not very likely. By some kind of availability heuristic (see footnote 14 in this chapter), that reminder will increase your estimate of the probability of dying soon, which implies that you don’t have much time left to obtain rewards. So, their expected value is low, and any planning is less useful and highly restricted by this time horizon. Buddhist practices also include contemplation of death; it may serve slightly different purposes (Anālayo, 2003, p. 155), but the classic manual Visuddhimagga (Chapter VIII, 41) links it directly to “disenchantment” and “conquer[ing] attachment”. Nevertheless, some psychological research based on the Terror Management Theory claims that reminding people of their mortality may, in fact, increase their willingness to consume (Kasser and Sheldon, 2000); see also Burke et al. (2010); Gao et al. (2020). Frias et al. (2011) propose a model to understand why such quite opposite effects can be observed, and how exactly the death reflection should be done to increase gratitude and reduce greed.