From Depression to Enlightenment: How Embracing Life’s Fate Can Change Everything
When I decided to discontinue my antidepressant medication after taking it for over a year, my doctor warned me about the possibility of experiencing a “jojo effect.” And despite feeling stable for several months prior, I dipped back into the darkness. This short period of feeling lost in the depths of depression made me feel like life was once again challenging my convictions. Suddenly, I began questioning everything I was doing, and the business I had worked tirelessly to build over the course of eight years seemed meaningless. The voice in my head urged me to make dramatic changes, convinced that my life had become dull and uninspiring.
On a Saturday, I found myself at my sister’s place, complaining about my situation and allowing the depression to take full hold of my reality once again. She looked at me with concern and suggested, “Why don’t you go out, have some fun, and forget about that nonsense?” Taking her advice, I had a few drinks and engaged in numerous delightful and completely random encounters and conversations with strangers that night.
However, what resonated with me most was a simple message that I took away from that evening: “Close the drawer and open a new one.” In other words, stop dwelling on the past and shift your focus towards the experiences you wish to have instead. This profound shift in perspective helped me bounce back into the light the very next day, though not without a slight hangover as a reminder of the previous night’s fun.
What would you think if you were informed right now that you would be able to experience this life, with all of its ups and downs, riches and tragedies, pleasures and sufferings, over and over for eternity? Would you be scared? Would you like to alter it? Would you be satisfied with it? What might you do or think to make it acceptable, if not desirable?
Friedrich Nietzsche utilized a variant of this contemplation as a form of thought experiment known as the eternal recurrence, in part, to study and investigate one of his fundamental philosophical ideas known as amor fati. The word amor fati means “love of one’s fate” in Latin.
Nietzsche’s life was filled with adversity and failure. He had left his family and academic profession to pursue freedom and freelance writing. But, he was unable to escape the lingering bad impacts of his family, nor was he able to achieve success in his writing. He had lost acquaintances, relationships, and, soon, his sanity. His health deteriorated steadily during his middle age as a result of several maladies, and he was usually bedridden and in pain.
His work was all he had, and it wasn’t enough — at least not at the moment. His writings did not sell well, and his philosophy received little attention. His life was plagued by failure after failure, agony after misery, until he died in a rather horrible way. Of course, we now know that Nietzsche went on to become a huge, global success after his death, rising to notoriety as possibly one of the greatest philosophical minds to ever live.
So, how could such a smart, philosophical mind live with such a horrible, failure-ridden existence? He tried to philosophize it, to get knowledge and insight from it; he conceptualized and integrated his understanding of amor fati. When Nietzsche refers to amor fati, he may be alluding to the love of one’s life more broadly. The term love is also important in this context as a vital element to his usage.
It suggests more than mere stoic acceptance but rather an almost enthusiastic and complete adoration. It is a sentiment, or rather, a declaration against the tendency to regret, assume control over outcomes and conditions of one’s reality, do things differently, or know better, and to have lived without particular negatives that would ultimately yield more positives.
Instead, it is about loving and embracing life exactly as it is, with all its good and bad, success and failure, satisfaction and pain. “My formula for human greatness is amor fati,” Nietzsche writes, “that one desires nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. This includes not only enduring what is necessary, but also loving it, without any idealism or falseness in the face of necessity.”
Naturally and understandably, we tend to find ourselves doing the opposite, deluded by the mirage of hindsight and wishful thinking. It seems as though there were options to have done things differently, for things to have gone better. We regret and yearn for otherness. In theory, this may be true, as there were different potential options to choose from in the past and different ways for things to go in the future. However, in reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have done things differently, and there is no other way for things to go.
Resenting or fighting against what has happened to you or because of you only brings additional misery onto the present moment, exacerbating and adding more to resent and resist. It’s like pouring gasoline of regret onto a fire of unchangeable circumstances, unnecessarily intensifying the flames. The true challenge and task of life, according to Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all its ways.
However, amor fati does not deny the notion of striving to overcome and achieve, of fighting against life’s current and trying to control our destiny. Rather, one’s fate encompasses these struggles, including the inevitable failures. In fact, the idea of amor fati can be seen as Nietzsche’s own personal triumph, as well as a potential victory for those who adopt it. It is an overcoming of the unattainable ideal of self-overcoming and the perfect life.
Amor fati is a willingness to accept the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that often tries to make us hate it, and to smile in the face of adversity. As Nietzsche himself said, “What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?” Perhaps it is this willingness to embrace life in all its imperfections that makes Nietzsche one of the most notable and dynamic philosophers of all time.
