Amor Fati—Part I: Introduction

My yearning no longer paints dreamy colors across the veiled distances, my eyes are satisfied with what exists, because they have learned to see. The world has become lovelier than before.

The world has become lovelier. I am alone, and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than what it is.

—Hermann Hesse

The expression amor fati—love your fate—is most famously associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the goal of life was not the pursuit of happiness or comfort, not the avoidance of suffering, and certainly not blind obedience to any virtues or values conceived or dictated by other people. The goal of life, according to Nietzsche is this: affirmation.

Affirming life, to Nietzsche, meant not just tolerating or accepting life through difficult times and not just enjoying life’s positive aspects while they last, but finding a way to love life as it is, at all times, no matter what fate throws your way—beauty or ugliness, pain or bliss, justice or injustice, successes or failures, wins or losses, health or sickness, prosperity or poverty, adoration or hatred. All lives have positive and negative aspects. To ignore the negative aspects of life is to live a partial life—to live in denial.

Loving life, to Nietzsche, was not just about finding some positive aspects in it that balance or outweigh the negative ones, and not about enduring difficulties in hope of better days. Loving life, to Nietzsche, meant being willing to relive life in all its details, good and bad, over and over again—in exactly the same way, wishing for nothing to be different—to infinity. This idea is embodied in Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence.” Among Nietzsche’s prolific writings, perhaps the most poignant and succinct expression of the attitude of amor fati is embodied in these words by his protagonist, Zarathustra: “Was that life? Well then! Once more!”

In his book, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote: “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 […] but love it.”

Nietzsche criticized past philosophers for trying to lull people into the false belief that life, if lived under certain rules, restrictions, or prescribed virtues, can be easy, blissful, pleasant, free of suffering. Suffering, he believed, is an inevitable and necessary part of life. Enduring and overcoming suffering, no matter how unpleasant, ultimately give life meaning and foster such elevated feelings and qualities as inner strength, resilience, pride, self-worth, and courage.

I very much doubt there’s even one person reading who would not want some things about their life and about the world to be different. Certainly, I am not such a person. Of course, each of us likely, if asked whether we love life, may have different answers at different points in time. But this is not really the point of amor fati.

The point of adopting the attitude of amor fati—of loving fate—is to consider life as a whole, with all its ups and downs, joys and sufferings, beauty and wretchedness, hopes and despairs, through all of one’s lifetime, and to ask ourselves: if this is the only life we get, to repeat over and over in exactly the same way for all eternity, would we do the same rollercoaster ride all over again?

Nietzsche believed that the answer must be yes. In fact, he thought that the answer must be yes even if you’ve lived a difficult, painful life, if only you’ve had even just one experience of true awe and transcendence. As he put it: “If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

I can’t say for certain that I would affirm my own life so emphatically as Nietzsche suggested. I don’t think Nietzsche would have, either. A person capable of such absolute affirmation is one who would live up to Nietzsche’s idea of an Übermensch: an over-man (not “superman”: the ambiguous term sometimes used to describe fictional characters having supernatural abilities). However, I can absolutely affirm that intense experiences such as Nietzsche described—moments of awe and transcendence, periods of flow and aesthetic bliss—indeed make even my most challenging times bearable and worthy, if only by the mere knowledge that as I journey through life I may experience more of them.

The knowledge that such experiences are still possible and may await me if I persevere and hold onto life through times of suffering and despair, is the most powerful medicine I know of for some of my darkest states of mind. Being no stranger to such states, Nietzsche, too, remarked: “If you have your ‘why?’ in life, you can get along with almost any ‘how?'”.

In this new series of articles, my goal is share with you some of the ways I have found to affirm life by pursuing emotionally intense experiences—experiences of awe, transcendence, power, flow, and profound meaning—consciously and deliberately rather than leaving them to the whims of random chance.

These lessons, while varied and seemingly unrelated, have this in common: they all involve two essential factors that are at least to a degree within my control: circumstances and attitude. As one of Nietzsche’s own inspirations, Arthur Schopenhauer expressed it:

The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.

Proceed to Part II: Vastness.

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