Amor fati is fancy-ass Latin for "love your fate".

Someone cuts you off in traffic. Your boss thinks the sun shines out of your competitor's ass. Your pants split wide open when you bend over to pick up a pen. Shit happens. And my job, all of our job, is to accept it.

We all know this dog:

I love this dog. Too often this image is posted to criticize those who ignore the fire in the room, the pandemic in their cities, the warming of the oceans.

But what if, hear me out here, instead of using this dog to criticize people, we use it to motivate people.

What if we treated everything that happens as something to be embraced, not avoided. We're stuck in a burning room? This is fine. We're cut off in traffic? This is fine. We're dumped out of the blue? This is fine.

Now this is fine doesn't mean we aren't happy or sad or devastated or pissed off that something shitty happened. What it does mean is it already happened. So what are we going to do about it?

Are we going to lash out and moan and complain?
Or are we going to deal with whatever it was that sucked ass? Take action to handle the shit?

Choose to deal with the shit instead of just moaning about the shit.

Derren Brown, author of one of my favourite contemporary books on Stoicism Happy, implores us to look at what isn’t in our control and say “It’s fine.”

a key to living more happily is to simply decide that you are very happy with reality per se. We might as well be, because if we try to change things we cannot control, we are going to become angry and frustrated.

How much more resilient could we be if we just amor fati'ed our way through life?