29.09.2026 Diary XXIX Amor fati: loving what is, or accepting it?

29.09.2026 Diary Page XXIX

I do not have to love what happened. It is enough to stop acting as if it had not happened.

Tuesday. Today an old notebook of mine came into my hands. From my university years, dated in the margins, half of it empty.

The first three pages are full. Then twenty empty pages. Then a completely different subject, again three pages. Then again emptiness.

The person who kept that notebook had not been diagnosed. She did not know why it was like this and, as far as I know, she was very angry at herself.

Nietzsche's sentence

Amor fati means loving your fate. Nietzsche proposes it as a formula: a person's greatness lies in not wanting anything to be otherwise than it is.

Not backward, not forward, not for all eternity. Not merely bearing what is, but loving it.

When I first read this sentence I found it repellent. Because it seemed to have a consequence like this: saying yes to everything that happens to you, to the evils and the losses too.

Years later I think the idea is not this. Or at least this is not the version that works for me.

Accepting and resigning yourself

In Turkish these two get mixed up, and when they do, it does harm.

Resigning yourself contains a judgment. It says that what happened was good, deserved or necessary. About a late diagnosis I would not say this: it was not good, it was not necessary, it is nothing anybody deserved.

Accepting is not a judgment. It is acknowledging that what happened happened. Stopping acting as if it had not happened.

The difference shows up here: resigning yourself justifies the past, accepting puts the past in its place.

What I am able to do is the second.

Twenty-three years

I received the diagnosis at twenty-three. For a long time I kept an account of the years before it.

The account worked like this: if I had known earlier, I would have finished that school, I would not have left that job, I would not have spoken to those people that way. Next to every item there was a figure of loss.

There is a problem with this account. Its total never comes out. Because the alternative life is not data, it is a guess. And the person making that guess evaluates the conditions of that day with today's knowledge.

In yesterday's piece I talked about the two kinds of time. There is something similar here: the past can be measured as chronos, I can say twenty-three years. But what could have happened inside those years is not something measurable.

I wrote about this in detail in the piece on grief after diagnosis. What I want to add today is this: closing that account does not mean approving of the past.

The gaps in the notebook

The thing that bothered me most in the notebook that came into my hands was not the empty pages. It was the three-page beginnings.

Each one started with enthusiasm. Neat handwriting, small diagrams drawn in the margin, numbered items. Then cut off.

For a long time I read those breaks as a character flaw. Now I see something else: the best that could be done by someone without a system.

This sentence is the version of amor fati that fits me. I do not love the past. But I accept that the person in the past worked with what she had.

What Nietzsche really said

Reading the idea more carefully, I think amor fati is not about the past. It looks to the future.

The formula asks this: can you live the same life, with the same losses, in such a way that you would be willing to live it again and again forever?

This is not a consolation, it is a criterion. Do you stand behind the decision you made today so much that you would want it repeated infinitely?

Read this way, the sentence stops being comforting and becomes demanding. Accept the past, fine. But evaluate what you are doing today with the same eye.

What I did today

I threw the notebook away. Then I took it out of the trash and put it on the shelf.

Both happened within the same day and I know the reason for both. Throwing it away was ignoring those years. Taking it back was accepting them.

Its place on the shelf is settled. I do not think I will open it again but it does something by standing there: it reminds me that that person existed.

Yesterday I wrote that I had stopped fighting myself. One front of that war was this: fighting the person in the past. Judging her with today's knowledge, blaming her for something she did not know.

The formula in Ecce Homo

Nietzsche mentions amor fati first in The Gay Science, and in Ecce Homo, one of his last books, he gives it great weight. The sentence there is well known: the formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati; to want nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.

The part I underlined when I first read this sentence was "in all eternity." Not wanting something to be otherwise is not a momentary acceptance; it means being ready to bear the infinite repetition too.

This is connected to Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. In section 341 of The Gay Science a demon asks: what if you had to live this life, with all its pains, countless more times? Would you hear this as a curse, or as a divine good news?

The question is not a metaphysical claim, it is a test. It questions whether you affirm your life.

Epictetus's plainer version

The same idea has a Stoic relative and I find it calmer. In the eighth section of the Enchiridion, Epictetus says: do not demand that events happen as you wish; wish that events happen as they do happen, and you will go well.

When the two sentences stand side by side, the difference appears. Nietzsche wants loving, passion, affirmation. Epictetus wants harmony: not fighting against what is.

In the gap that remains between these two is the place where I stand. I do not love the past; but I have stopped fighting it. I am with Epictetus, walking toward Nietzsche.

Acceptance and commitment

This philosophical line has a counterpart in psychotherapy: acceptance and commitment therapy. The main idea of the approach is, instead of trying to change uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, to act in line with your values together with them.

I described this in detail in the piece on acceptance and commitment. What draws attention here is that this approach carries both sides of amor fati: acceptance is not passivity, it is a starting point for movement.

The concept the therapy uses is "psychological flexibility." Being able to carry a feeling without wanting it, but also without seeing it as an obstacle. It is a relative of what Epictetus advises, living without reining in.

What will not be accepted

The danger of amor fati is that it can slide into accepting everything. This needs to be written openly.

Injustice, violence, neglect: these are not a fate to be accepted, they are things to be changed. Using amor fati as a philosophical excuse for submitting to injustice is turning the idea inside out.

Epictetus himself makes this separation: what is in our hands and what is not. Changing what is in our hands, that is our own actions, is the other face of accepting. I accept what has happened in the past; I change what I can change today.

For me this distinction is the entire useful part of amor fati. Accepting the past opens room for improving today.

What I listened to today

Arvo Pärt — Für Alina.

The first piece Pärt wrote with the tintinnabuli method. There are very few notes. Two voices on the piano, long intervals, repetition.

The reason I find this piece fitting for today is this: it was written by subtraction. They say Pärt came back with this piece after years in which he could not write, and when he came back he had much less material than before.

Working with little material means working with what you have. The three-page beginnings in the notebook were like that too.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow October begins. Of the three items of yesterday's week plan, two held and one did not.

Two out of three. This is the sentence I will say to myself: two out of three is far more than zero.