Amor fati – love of one’s fate. Nietzsche’s phrase for the attitude that everything that happens to you, including the awful bits, is not just bearable but necessary, and ideally something you can welcome rather than merely endure.
I keep coming back to it because it’s the harder half of the Stoic pair. Memento Mori tells you to remember you will die, which is useful for cutting through nonsense. Amor Fati tells you to love what happens to you, which is useful for not going mad while it’s happening. One without the other feels incomplete – mortality without fate is just anxiety, and fate without mortality is just fatalism.
The tricky part is that it doesn’t mean pretending the bad things are good. You don’t have to like losing your job, or watching someone you care about deteriorate, or whatever particular unpleasantness is in front of you. What it means is refusing to spend your life resenting what has already happened, because resentment is just paying interest on a debt that’s already been collected. You take what you’ve got and you make it part of the story rather than letting it sit there like a splinter you keep picking at.
I’m not saying this comes naturally. I have to think about it deliberately, usually after I’ve already spent a day or two fuming about something I couldn’t control. But the idea has been useful – not as a cure-all, just as a reminder that there’s a difference between what happens and whether you let it make you bitter.