Michel de Montaigne argues in this 1580s essay that the way to beat fear of death is to get familiar with it. He suggests that we should think about death constantly, in small moments such as a stumbling horse or a falling roof tile, so that it stops feeling strange and terrifying. He points to the Egyptians, who brought a skeleton to feasts as a reminder of mortality. His reasoning is that someone who has accepted death is freed from being controlled by fear, because nothing else can hold power over them. His aim was to examine his own mind honestly.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.