³³Quote from The Enchiridion, Paragraph 21. 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 12 in this chapter), that reminder will increase your estimate of the probability of dying soon, which implies that you don’t have much time to obtain rewards left. So, their expected value is low, and any planning is less useful and highly restricted by this time horizon. (Such a reminder might also lead to gratitude for being alive; understanding the mechanisms of gratitude is, however, outside of the scope of this book.) Buddhist practices also include contemplation of death; it may serve slightly different purposes (Anālayo, 2003, p. 155), but the classical 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). It remains to be understood why such quite opposite effects can be observed.