Day 9 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
This is the hardest idea in Stoicism.
Not the hardest to understand.
Intellectually, it’s simple: accept what happens.
Embrace it.
Don’t just tolerate your circumstances, love them.
While the Latin phrase amor fati, love of fate, became associated with Stoicism through later thinkers like Nietzsche, the core idea runs through Marcus Aurelius directly.
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, and do so with all your heart.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Simple to understand.
Genuinely difficult to do.
The difficulty isn’t with pleasant circumstances.
Loving your fate when things are going well is easy, that’s just gratitude with a philosophy degree.
The challenge is the other kind.
The relationship that ended.
The opportunity you didn’t get.
The body that stopped working the way it used to.
The years you spent on something that didn’t pay off.
The harm you couldn’t prevent.
Amor fati says: this too.
Not only the good, this too.
It’s worth being precise about what this is not.
It’s not the claim that bad things aren’t bad.
The Stoics weren’t that naive.
Seneca lost friends, was exiled, watched corruption he couldn’t stop, and eventually received the order, from a man he’d helped raise, to take his own life.
He didn’t pretend these things were secretly good.
He accepted them as real, and he refused to let his rage against them become the dominant fact of his inner life.
And it’s not passive acceptance in the sense of giving up.
Marcus Aurelius spent years fighting wars he didn’t choose, reforming systems he hadn’t created, managing crises that arrived without warning.
He wasn’t sitting still, serenely accepting the world as it was.
He was working hard to change what he could.
Yet he wasn’t eating himself alive over what he couldn’t.
The distinction is between resentment and acceptance.
Resentment is the refusal to let things be what they are, the constant argument with reality.
“This shouldn’t have happened”
“If only things had been different”
“Why did this have to happen to me?”
Resentment is an understandable response to genuine injustice.
It’s also, the Stoics observed, completely ineffective at changing anything, while being very effective at making you miserable.
Acceptance is the decision to start from where you actually are, not from where you wish you were.
For vegans, amor fati tends to surface around one very specific grief: the years before you knew.
The meals you ate, the products you bought, the choices you made before you had the information or the framework you have now.
Many vegans describe a kind of retroactive guilt, a wish to have known earlier, to have caused less harm, to have been the person you are now before you became that person.
The Stoic response is direct: you cannot return to before.
The past is the category of things most thoroughly outside your control, it is fixed, immovable, immune to regret.
What you can do is choose what to do with what you know now.
There’s also a version of this grief that runs in the other direction.
The question of whether it’s enough, whether one person’s choices, even consistent and principled ones, matter against the scale of industrial animal agriculture.
Whether your individual decision to go vegan actually changes anything, or whether it’s a private moral gesture in a world that doesn’t notice.
Amor fati doesn’t answer that question empirically.
It answers it from a different angle: you don’t control the outcome.
You control the choice.
And the choice matters, not because it will definitely produce the outcome you want.
It matters because it’s the kind of person you’ve decided to be.
That has to be enough.
The Stoics would say it’s more than enough.
It’s the only thing that was ever actually yours.
Practice for today
Think of something that happened to you, a loss, a failure, a circumstance you didn’t choose, that you still carry resentment about.
Write about it honestly.
Then write: what would it actually mean to accept this, not just tolerate it, to genuinely accept it as part of how you got to where you are?
You don’t have to arrive at acceptance today.
Just notice the distance between where you are and where the Stoics are pointing.
Cameron is a prolific blogger with a number of sites where he shares his thoughts on a wide range of topics.
His main site is CameronBlewett.blog
You can find Cameron on Twitter, and MeWe by following the links.