Don’t Live Your Life Hoping Things Will Just Work Out

Reject Fate and Make Your Own Way

The other day I was randomly thinking about the night I met the woman who would become my wife at a drinking festival in Japan. I was actually trying to meet some other girl whose number I got a few weeks prior but couldn’t get her out over text, and lo and behold met the woman that I would marry instead just an hour or so later, completely by chance.

Some people would say “it was meant to be”. As if there were no other possible outcome to have happened. I don’t believe that. If it were true that things “just work out” for everyone, then why don’t they work out for victims of horrible crimes, freak accidents, genocides and the like? Unless we want to say they were meant to go through unspeakable hell? I don’t want to be part of a plan that includes that.

There’s an idea in Stoicism called, in Latin, Amor Fati or “love of fate.” Marcus Aurelius put it as such:

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist and survivor of the Holocaust, had a similar idea:

You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and what you will do about what happens to you.

I’ll be the first to say, absolutely, you cannot control everything that happens to you. There is a peace to be had in the acceptance that you while you may not dictate the events outside of your control, you do have the power to decide to be a happy and good person regardless.

My issues is not with that standpoint.

My issue is with the view that we ought to passively accept anything and everything Fate throws at us as if trying to actively create certain outcomes for ourselves is a bad thing. As if everything will just be given to us if we wait for it or believe that it will happen.

Bullshit.

If you take Stoicism to its extreme logical end, that is exactly what you should do. Be passive. Because the only thing that you can truly control is your mind, your response to what happens to you. Anything else can be stripped away in a moment.

You think you control your health? You don’t. A car crash can leave you paraplegic, you can get cancer out of nowhere regardless of how clean you live. In the end you don’t actually have total control over these things.

To be a true Stoic you have to focus only on what you can control, and that is your mind…..provided you’re not suffering from a mentally degenerative disease.

Aurelius and others do talk about doing your duty, so there is your action filled life as a Stoic.

When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic — what defines a human being — is to work with others.

— Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

But I think that is a contradiction. How can one fulfill their duty when those actions are also not totally within their control? I can try to be a good husband, and that virtue is very Stoic, however as a good husband I also want to actually stay married and keep my family safe, and all of these are outside of my complete control.

My point here is that a good life is not only found in being content with what you have, with being an immovable stone in the storm of life.

It is also found in creating good things in this world. It is found in impacting change. It is found in building, destroying, taking action. And none of these things are fully in your control, they can all be taken away from you.

What about Fate? What about the idea that “everything will just work out”?

In one sense everything does become ok….as in you can heal from trauma, you can become desensitized to your past. But only if you walk that path, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will happen to you if you do not take action.

As for Fate itself? Only if there actually is some Divine that takes an active interest in what happens to each and every one of us.

I think that even if the Divine does exist in some form, it is incredibly egoistical to think that our lives should be a certain way just because “God loves us.”

If you take a peak at the vast history of humankind you see mass suffering. Sure, there is joy too. But also deep dark horrors. Were those people not loved by God?

The millions slain by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. The thousands devastated today in Syria, North Korea, Libya. The abused wife. The murdered children of the affluent family.

To think that your life will just automatically “be good”, whether from Fate or God or whatever, is naïve. I personally know a few decent people who have died in the past few years. All of them under 40 years old. All of them my age. Did things “just work out” for them?

If anything, by not taking action, you can ensure that life will be hard for you. Then you are at the mercy of the writhing waves of entropy.

By not actively working on your health, you guarantee a faster approaching death and a malaise of a life now.

By not working on your wealth, you guarantee having to work the job you hate and might face poverty in your elder days.

By not working on how you treat people, don’t be surprised when you find yourself all alone at the end.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I’m actually a militant optimist. I just get angry when I hear that there’s a plan for us, or that everything works out in the end. It doesn’t.

But, I also believe that you can seize control of your life. Yes, not everything is under the power of your influence. I can build my empire today and suddenly get a heart attack tomorrow.

But why does that matter? Are only the things in my control beautiful? Can’t I enjoy the work I do today, even if a flood washes it away later?

I can and I do. I take action. I do things. Things also fall apart so I hold them loosely. But hold them I do. Treasure them I do.

If I want to see good things in life, I have to make them happen. The responsibility is up to me. If I see evil in my life, crushing it is up to me.

If you want to find the “one”, start by rejecting the idea that there is a “one” and that you “deserve” to be given them. Instead, be the most awesome person you can become. Then finding a partner becomes so much easier afterwards.

Don’t whine about not getting promoted, not being fit, not being able to do whatever and then expect that those things will just be offered to you. They won’t. You have to go out and make them happen.

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