“How the hell do I deal with all…this?!?!?”
Life can be cruel. The world can be brutal about doing what it wants, not what we want. We can work hard, plan well, have it all together…and still get squished like a bug.
So how do we deal with that?
Fortunately, we are not the first to ponder this question: others have come before us. Today we leave the indomitable Akira the Don behind in favor of…Friedrich Nietzsche.
What’s Nietzsche Got To Do With It?
(If you’re still reading after that stellar opening, good on you!)
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”
This is pretty straightforward stuff, so no worries. We’re not going to go sliding down some sort of greasy pole into the depths of morality, reality, or the nature of “knowing.”
Amor Fati is a Latin phrase which, roughly, means “love of fate”.
People have been struggling with these choices since there were people, so if this idea bothers you you’re in good company. Skipping over thousands of years of humans systematically either over- or under-thinking things, there are three ways you can deal with reality:
Accept it;
Fight it;
Ignore it.
Freddy N. is telling us, broadly, to go for the first type of solution.
Alternative Approaches?
This is solid advice, but can be super-hard to figure out how to actually do. Let’s face it: most of the time, we want life to hand us the equivalent of a giant ice cream cone, not something difficult or painful. Sitting with those kinds of things is also very hard.
But it’s better than the alternatives, which may be easier at first but can be frustrating, if not seriously grim:
Fighting reality takes place on a wide spectrum. On the (usually) less consequential end are the small triumphs of hope over experience like New Years’ resolutions. More tragic examples are behaviors with their own medical or clinical diagnosis, like some addictions or the mental impacts of trauma.
Ignoring reality is also a popular option. Unfortunately, it often is self-correcting. Just because we don’t want something to be true doesn’t make it false. If you doubt this, fill in the blank in the following sentence with things like “the speed limit”, “gravity”, or “the tax code” and you’ll see what I’m getting at:
“You may not believe in (fill in the blank) but it believes in you.”
So accepting what we’ve been dealt starts to look like the closest thing to ideal among a collection of bad choices.
Good Things Taken Too Far
So how does that bring us back to Stoicism?
“Demand not that things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do, and you will go on well.”
Neither the first, nor the only thinker on this.
Image: Goodreads.com, unattributed.
Knowing what we may and may not change is a fundamental part of inquiry in the Stoics’ worldview, and so is understanding that we are parts of a greater whole.
No one is immune to the seductive idea that my idea of how things should be is better than how things really are.
To an extent, this is a good thing: without that feeling, we’d have no progress in any aspect of our lives.
The trouble is when that idea is taken too far, it can lead us into hubris, a dangerous excess of pride, self-confidence, or egotism.
If we are to meet upsets with equanimity, or live Nietzsche’s idea of loving “it”, whatever that might be, we need to accept and respect that our limits exist. That’s the first step to eventually loving the whole spectrum of our experiences from the good to the bad to the indifferent.
Passivity vs. Action
A quick detour:
To be clear, none of this is saying to do nothing. I would not suggest fatalism or passivity as a way of life, and neither do any real thinkers.
We are all free to want something to be different than it is, and lots of good comes from that. But no good comes from convincing ourselves that anything has to happen. That’s up to…the world, God, chance, karma, the fickle universe, or the spirits…we have a million labels for the workings of life.
This is where we get Epictetus, echoing Nietzsche. Or Marcus Aurelius reminding himself that “What is not good for the bee hive cannot be good for the bees." These are fancy ways of saying, basically, that we need to keep a lid on it when it comes to what we want.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t want to make our mark on the world. Nietzsche certainly didn’t think amor fati meant not writing or thinking or trying to untangle the universe. It does mean accepting that at some point, what we want and what’s going to happen are unrelated.
Don’t confuse being lucky with being worthy.
A Universal Impulse
Consider this as well.
This is not just a Western idea. Several of the meditation teachers I’ve enjoyed practicing with emphasized the idea of equanimity, drawing from various Asian traditions. One cultivates awareness of what is happening, or thoughts in the mind, without the intention of steering or judging them. There is observation, and acceptance.
The expression of these ideas are very different from what we’ve looked at above, but the essence has some similarities.
If you have trouble relating to the ancients or the spiritual traditions of either East or West, you may also find the same idea in the very modern and secular approach of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, particularly his rightly famous Man’s Search For Meaning.
The key thing is that whatever the form the expression of these questions, urges and answers may take, they’re part of a tradition of inquiry that seemingly spans all of the human experience.
And In Real Life
One practical way to express this in daily life is something I’ve run into repeatedly in totally unrelated writing and podcasting—most of it dealing with the perceptions and observations of two professional poker players who got to the table by way of academia.
Most of us judge our own success by our outcomes. Both Annie Duke and Maria Konnikova used poker as a sort of laboratory on life. Both concluded that no matter how skilled or determined we are, in the end there is always an element of the uncontrollable in everything we do.
Ultimately, we cannot control our outcomes.
What we can control is how we prepare for important moments. For them, it was at the poker table. For Marcus Aurelius, it was meeting unpleasant people, events or emotions. For you or me it may be a thousand other things, large or small.
The point is that no matter how little control we have, there is always room to prepare in some way to meet what life dishes up with equanimity, acceptance, balance—again, there are dozens of ways to label the idea.
Easier said than done? Yes, absolutely.
This can be hard, but like any skill it can be practiced. Start small, repeat, be consistent, be humble.
Eventually, the judging quiets down and is replaced by acceptance—and just maybe, we can start to love our fate.
That lets us love our lives and ourselves on a whole new and different level.
Remember, amor fati: it’s what Nietzsche would do!