Your Move to a New City Might Fail: Test It with a Pre-Mortem in AI

You found a flat in a new city. The job offer is signed, the deposit is paid, and the moving date is circled on your calendar. But at night, a quiet question keeps you awake: what if this whole plan falls apart? Most people push that question away because it feels like bad luck. A pre-mortem does the opposite. It invites the failure in early, while you can still change the script.

How the pre-mortem works with an AI assistant

The method is simple. Instead of asking whether your move will succeed, you tell the AI to assume it has already failed six months from now. The assistant then writes a short story of that failure: the lease you could not break, the neighborhood that felt wrong after three weeks, the job that demanded more hours than you expected. Each cause becomes a risk you can examine.

The AI does not know your life, so it will produce both sharp observations and generic noise. Your job is to sort the list. Some causes are preventable: you can negotiate a shorter lease, visit the area at night, or ask about overtime before signing. Others are not preventable but can be planned for: you might need a backup fund for the first two months, or a friend who can host you if the flat falls through. The exercise turns vague anxiety into a list of concrete decisions.

Test it yourself: weak prompt vs. calibrated prompt

The naive prompt

I am moving to a new city next month. What should I watch out for?

This answer is friendly but useless. It lists things you already know and never names a specific failure. It cannot help you decide whether to sign the lease or delay the move.

The calibrated prompt

Assume my move to a new city has already failed catastrophically six months from now. I signed a one-year lease, started a new job, and moved away from my family. Write a short post-mortem: what were the five most likely causes of the collapse? For each cause, tell me whether it was preventable before the move or only manageable after. Do not comfort me; be specific and blunt.

This answer works because it names specific, checkable failures. You can now act: ask about overtime, track real costs for a month, visit the neighborhood at night, and negotiate the lease start. The AI did not predict the future; it gave you a structured list to test against your own situation.

Master template to copy and paste

Use this template whenever you face a major life decision. Replace the brackets with your details and paste it into your AI assistant.

Assume my [DECISION, e.g., move to a new city] has already failed six months from now. My situation: [DESCRIBE YOUR PLAN, CONSTRAINTS, AND WHAT YOU CANNOT CHANGE]. Write a post-mortem with five likely causes of failure. For each cause, state whether it was preventable before the decision or only manageable after. Then rank the causes by how much damage they would do. Do not comfort me; be specific and blunt.

Quick steering commands if the AI gets too soft

• You are being too gentle. Rewrite the list as if you were a skeptical friend who has seen this move fail before.
• Remove any cause that is not specific to my situation. Replace it with one that names a concrete event, cost, or timeline.
• For each cause, add one sentence telling me what I could check or ask this week to reduce the risk.

How to know the exercise worked, and a tip for voice practice

You know the pre-mortem worked when you can point to at least one decision you changed because of it: a lease clause you renegotiated, a visit you scheduled, a budget line you added. If the list only made you feel anxious without giving you a next step, the prompt was too vague. Try again with more detail about your constraints.

For extra practice, open the free voice mode in your AI app on your phone and speak the pre-mortem out loud. Hearing your own plan described as a failure makes the risks feel real, and the AI can ask follow-up questions that a typed conversation might miss. Speak slowly, answer honestly, and write down the causes that surprise you. That written list is your real moving checklist.