How to Love Your Life When It SUCKS?

It’s so easy to enjoy every moment of your life and be thankful for the fate twists when things are going well, isn’t it?

When you wake up with your loved one in your arms, rush to your dream job, and have summer planned with exciting trips, you may even be ready to deal with the “hardships.” For instance, you might encounter a traffic jam or find yourself in the rain.

What about the times when your inner world is collapsing?

Your beloved one breaks your heart; you lose your job; or your best friend… Everything you want in those moments is probably to wake up and continue to enjoy and appreciate your perfect life as it was.

Alternatively, you may choose to activate the “acceptance mode” and place life in a neutral state. Still, it’s more about surviving, not a thriving

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that we can continue to live a happy life even when everything does not go according to plan.

Well, not only believed but also practiced it hands-on.

Nietzsche suffered greatly throughout his life because of an little-known disease at the time. He had to deal with chronic headaches, vomiting, and acute eye pain, as well as various impairments on the left side of his body. Add to that the social rejection he dealt with because of his non-standard views, loneliness, and rejection, and you can imagine how hard his life was.

Still, Nietzsche never complained. On the contrary, he always described his life as fulfilled and joyful.

“From such abysses, from such severe sickness… one must return newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”

What kept Friedrich Nietzsche afloat? He practiced the art of Amor Fati.

What is Amor Fati?

Amor fati is a Latin phrase that literally means love of fate.

Put simply, this concept is about embracing every single event that happens in your life as something good. Or, at least, necessary. Yes, even if it’s a disease, the loss of a job or a close person.

Nietzsche described this concept as “wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity, but to love it.”

Nietzsche believed that nothing else but our attitude toward events makes them positive and beautiful:

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.

And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

Nietzsche probably got inspired of the concept of embracing the events as they are from the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism. For example, with his dichotomy of control, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus suggests we should focus only on what we can personally influence, and learn to embrace all else. As he advises in The Art of Living:

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.

Stoics believed that Amor Fati mindset is the only way to reach happiness that would guide us throughout our whole lives.

How exactly does Amor Fati help to be happy?

When things happen in life that we cannot change or stop, it makes us feel helpless and worthless. This feeling itself can be even more destructive than the hardships we go through, right?

The concept of Amor Fati is about taking back control over your lives. Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychotherapist, famously said:

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

So, this is the first and most important way Amor Fati helps: not to exert more control over the world, but to take responsibility for how we view it and respond to it.

We must consciously choose to alter our perceptions for the better.

As soon as we change our perceptions for the better, we change our lives for the better. This leads to a more fulfilled and beautiful life.

“When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.”