Amor fati is Latin for love your fate, and the first time the phrase did anything to me I was standing in a stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors of my office building, not going up, not going down, just standing there, because it was the only room in the building where nobody could schedule me.
I had read it before. It hadn't worked before. That's something no one tells you about philosophy, that a sentence can sit inert in you for years and then one afternoon it isn't. Nietzsche wrote that he wanted to learn to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them. Amor fati: not merely to bear what happens, but to love it. When I first read that, in a better year, I thought, lovely. In the stairwell I thought, he cannot be serious. Love this?
This, at the time, being: a job I was good at and numb to. A body running on coffee and going to bed at one. A promotion I had wanted for two years that, when it finally came, felt like being handed a receipt.
Here is the ugly part, the part I would skip if I were selling something. I did not climb out of that by loving my fate. I climbed out slowly, by noticing one specific habit: I spent most of every day comparing the hour I was in to some other hour. The meeting to the weekend. The winter to an imaginary spring. February to a February where I had made different choices in 2019. I was never anywhere. That was the tiredness under the tiredness.
Camus's Sisyphus usually gets read as a hero of grit, which misses it. The boulder never gets lighter and he never gets stronger. What changes is that he stops appealing the verdict. The gods' whole machine runs on him wanting to be elsewhere, and he starves it.
I am not going to claim I love my fate. On good days I don't argue with it, and the not-arguing frees up a shocking amount of strength.
Nietzsche wanted a yes to the whole of life. What I have is smaller, and it is mine: I stopped grading my actual days against days that never existed. For now, that is what amor fati means at my desk, not in his book.