Amor Fati: The Formula for Human Greatness
What philosophy and psychology can teach us about making sense of the good, the bad, and the ugly in our past and present
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Who said it? No, not Kelly Clarkson. Well, she did make a hit song out of it, but she didn’t come up with it. (Regardless, I have to admit, it’s a catchy motivational tune. I apologize if it’s stuck in your head now.)
Believe it or not, this line has actually been around for much longer than the hit record. 116 years before release, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the saying in his work Twilight of the Idols. Sounds cryptic? You should see the German name for it — Die Götzen-Dämmerung.
Even 1800 years before Nietzsche, stoic philosophers showed signs of this thinking. The Greek philosopher Epictetus writes:
“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens to happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”
All these lines can be summed up into two Latin words, again established by Nietzsche:
Amor fati.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to know Latin to understand this concept. In fact, by reading this article, you will learn that, apart from its name, the idea is quite simple. Plus, there is research to back up the positive impact it can have on our lives.
Let’s break it down.
The Meaning of Amor Fati
Translated into English, amor fati means love of fate. If you’re anything like me, this still sounds kind of puzzling. So here’s another translation into proper English:
Everything has a purpose.
In other words, no matter what has happened or is happening in your life, it’s good for something. You should not only accept your life events but fall in love with them. As Nietzsche puts it:
“Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it…but to love it.”
Because let’s face it: when life turns upside down, we are generally faced with two options. We can either
- fall into misery and blame our environment or
- embrace the situation and make the best of it.
We cannot change the past. What we can do, however, is focus on what we should do from now on. So we might as well make the best of it.
How to Apply Amor Fati
Still not sure how you can apply amor fati to your own life? That’s OK. The following bullet point anecdote will serve as an example to help you understand the concept’s application.
- A young man decides to go to college because it’s his mother’s greatest wish.
- After six months of college, he feels lost and doesn’t see the value in it — he drops out but decides to stay as a drop-in.
- He attends a calligraphy class and learns everything there is to know about beautiful typography, all while he lives from hand to mouth.
- Ten years later, the man designs one of the first computers with a graphical user interface.
- Suddenly, the seemingly pointless calligraphy lessons all come back to him — it’s the first computer with beautiful typography.
- Today, the company producing these computers is one of the most successful and highest-grossing companies worldwide.
If you haven’t figured it out already, the man and the company we are talking about are Steve Jobs and Apple.
Jobs’ life journey is amor fati at its best; he felt lost at age 17 and had no idea how college was going to help him. But instead of panicking, he trusted in the path life presented upon him — no matter how confusing and messy things seemed.
Steve Jobs had a different name for amor fati: connecting the dots. In his Standford commencement address, he gets to the heart of it:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
The Science of Amor Fati
Steve Jobs, Nietzsche, the Stoic — and let’s not forget about Kelly Clarkson! — all of these extraordinary personalities stumbled across the same concept. When a pattern like this emerges, chances are, there is some kind of science beneath it.
And indeed, there is psychological evidence supporting the positive effect of loving one’s fate: our life story and post-traumatic growth.
A positive life story enhances your well-being
According to psychology professor Dan McAdams, our personality is based on three levels:
- General traits, such as introversion/extraversion.
- Personal concerns, such as values, goals, and strategies.
- Life stories: how we rate and justify the events in our life. For example, our choices of profession, the city we live in, or friends and partners.
Level three, our life story, is the most complex, yet the most flexible level of personality. McAdams’ research suggests these stories can change over time, and some stories are better than others.
Simply put, you can choose to love your fate — or connect the dots — by making sense of suffering and setbacks in your life. Thus, telling a positive life story of yourself contributes to psychological health, well-being, and maturity.
You can grow from adversity
Coming back to the introductory sentence, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — is it true?
According to psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, the answer is “yes, but…”
When the answer is yes, we speak of post-traumatic growth. According to Haidt, trauma makes you grow in three ways:
- Trauma makes you more confident in facing future obstacles because you become more aware of your coping abilities with tough challenges.
- Hardships strengthen your relationships with people who matter most in your life.
- Trauma shows how precious your life is and helps you set your priorities straight. That is, it helps you realize what you actually want to do with your life.
Now for the but…
The limitations of amor fati
In most cases, amor fati excels at making sense of past events. It thus helps us toward a more positive approach in trusting our lives. Yet, when talking about loving our fates, we also need to address the limitations.
Negative events in life can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this case, the self-help approach of loving one’s fate fails — we need to get help. For this, there are promising treatments, such as psychotherapy. These treatments can, in turn, lead to post-traumatic growth.
Furthermore, the sheer belief of “I trust in my life” is not enough. If we want to grow, we need to take action. There are two approaches you can take:
- Directly fix the root cause of the problem in real life. (This may not always be an available solution).
- Do the work within by finding a silver lining, learning from mistakes, or simply restructuring your thoughts. Typically, the best methods are conversations or writing down your stream of thoughts.
In every case, you should avoid escaping or denying hardships by drinking, taking drugs, or distracting yourself.
If you want to love your fate, you need to face your fate.
A Formula for Human Greatness
Let’s rewind a bit to summarize how we got from Kelly Clarkson to post-traumatic growth:
- Amor fati teaches us to not only embrace but fall in love with everything that happens in our lives — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
- We can apply amor fati by connecting the dots and trusting our actions will pay off one day.
- Loving our fate supports growth and well-being.
- We need to take action and face our fate, not escape or deny it.
- In the case of PTSD, the self-help approach is not enough, and we need to get professional help.
Nietzsche called amor fati his “formula for human greatness”.
I propose you make this formula your own — your fate formula if you will. In this formula, the variables (input) represent past and present events in your life. The solution (output) is your purpose.
Right now, solving the formula might be hard. In fact, it might leave you completely baffled when you look at it. With time, new and mysterious variables will appear, but you will also find new tools to crack the code. And yes, it might take months or years to find a solution.
That’s why you need to fall in love with the process of solving the formula.
But then, some day, you’ll glance at the formula with the solution in front of you. You will see how every event in your life made you the person you are today.
And you will love it.
That’s amor fati.