Amor Fati

How to feel good when life is terrifying

When I was on holiday last month I got talking to a woman who hates flying. Even the idea of getting on a plane made her visibly tense up. My ears pricked up when I heard this …

“Here I come” from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

I used to be an anxious flyer. They weren't quite panic attacks, but I wasn’t happy up there. I would grip the arm rests as if doing so could control the plane, as my heart lurched and my head felt like it was floating away from my body.

Nowadays, I rather enjoy flying¹ and, though I try not to give unsolicited advice,² here was a clear opportunity to help.

There are two reasons I like flying:

First is that air travel unbelievably safe. Look at the number of deaths per mile travelled, look at the effort that goes into fixing past faults, and look at the ability of a plane to glide even when it loses the use of both engines. It is safer than having a bath. Once you know all this it is much easier to trust the machine to do its job.

The second reason is that I have pretty much surrendered myself to my fate.³ When I get on a plane I think: "well, not much I can do now if we get into trouble."⁴ If there is turbulence, I try to enjoy it like a rollercoaster. I am more or less at peace with who I am and what I’ve done. If I die, I die.

It is worth noting that planes don’t have a row 13, which gives surely gives unwarranted credence to the superstitious.

I don’t know if this advice helped at all. The woman was only seventeen. It’s a lot easier to think you’re the centre of the universe when you're that age; and it is this that makes rare events seem more likely. But this converation did make me think about how much we can or should trust to fate, god, destiny, the stars …

Like I say, I try not to give advice but sometimes you can't resist. Lauren, who actually co-hosts a relationship advice podcast asked this on Twitter:

Lauren @laurencrillyy

if you're not on an anti depressants and you're "feeling good" despite external factors being terrifying, please tell me your ways

I have never taken an anti-depressant and muddle along fairly optimistically, so I replied⁵ with a link to the Wikipedia page about amor fati, the Latin phrase meaning ‘love of one’s fate,’ that Nietzsche thought was a path to liberation.⁶

To love one’s fate is to totally surrender the current situation, to embrace your suffering as an instruction rather than something to resent. I thought it was a good way of describing a stoic attitude that allows you to be at peace. This is not to say suffering is deserved, but to acknowledge it’s an essential part of the universe and that it’s easier to act effectively if you don’t deny it.

Amor fati is a powerful idea. Try it. Try thinking that everything that is happening right now is absolutely fated. How does that feel?

I can only sustain it for a short while, that feeling of being at one with my destiny. Before long I notice that everything around me was created by people who didn’t just accept their fate: people who built things, designed things, acted, campaigned, and took action. If everything is fated, why not just do nothing since that would also be fated?

There are multiple crises occurring at the moment: inflation, potentially paralysing fuel bills, food banks, war in Ukraine, climate change, overpopulation, depopulation … so much to worry about and most of us have zero leverage to make a difference, however much we shout into the void online. Whilst the portion of your existence that you can influence may be small in the face of systemic problems, there is always something that can be controlled.

Rather than talk about amor fati, we might do better with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference. 

In other words, when everything else is going wrong, you can at least clean your room.

Clean your room, Jordan Peterson

1. Apart from feeling guilty for environmental reasons.

2. It’s one of the unwritten rules of this blog never to give advice. Giving advice feels good. It feels amazing. I sometimes think if you could spend your entire life giving advice (and never had to put your advice into practice) you would be happy. Whenever you see a guru with gleaming teeth they seem pretty content, but they are like ouroboroses consuming their own tail. Few of them ever achieve any of the kind of things that you want to achieve. Indeed, one of the people I know with the most acute anxiety wrote several books advising people how to live. Giving advice puts you in a position of the master and erodes your humility and openness to experience. The question I always is of advice is: what if you’re wrong? Do you have any culpability for the advice you gave?

3. I say “pretty much” because of how I felt writing this article on the plane back to Glasgow:

I am writing this whilst flying and worry that I am teasing fate by extolling the safety of air travel. It’s not that I think that destiny is watching as I write these words and chuckling at how funny it would be to kill me right now, more that I think the worst death is the ironic death.

4. Of course, I often think of Liam Neeson in The Grey, wrapping himself up in multiple seatbelts as a way of surviving a crash.

5. Duncan, who recently started his own Substack, which I recommend you subscribe, also replied with a video from Alan Watts which shows the necessity of struggle in life. I am ambivalent about Alan Watts whose alcoholism and abandonment of his wife seems to suggest that he was avoidant of struggle, but the point remains valid.

6. Nietzsche had a nervous breakdown when trying to rescue a horse from being beaten. His empathy was so strong that perhaps he couldn't handle the idea of so much suffering being a necessity.