Imagine living a life replayed on a loop, every victory, every setback, every joy, every heartbreak, repeating endlessly. What would stir within you? Would fear take hold? Would you long to rewrite the story? Or could you, perhaps, find peace and even longing within this unbroken cycle?

Friedrich Nietzsche, the celebrated philosopher of the 19th century, grappled with this idea of the eternal recurrence. This contemplation led him to embrace a central tenet of his philosophy, known as amor fati—the love of one’s fate. While this idea traces back to Stoic thinkers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche redefined and championed amor fati as a core value in his own work, elaborating on it in texts like The Gay Science and Ecce Homo.

In his later years, Nietzsche withdrew to the quiet of the Swiss Alps, confronting the aftermath of a life filled with hardship and disappointment. He had cut ties with his family and abandoned his academic career to pursue his writing. Yet, no matter how far he retreated, the scars of his past remained, and success as a writer eluded him. He suffered the loss of friendships, relationships, and ultimately his own mental well-being. Struggling with physical ailments, his health steadily declined, often leaving him bedridden in agony. His writing became his refuge, yet even that failed to bring relief. His books sold poorly, and his ideas went largely unrecognized. His life seemed like a series of unmet aspirations, ultimately leading to a tragic and largely uncelebrated end. Yet, through time, Nietzsche’s work found its audience, elevating him posthumously to the stature of one of history’s most influential philosophers.

So, how did this brilliant mind, burdened by failure and suffering, face such adversity? He turned to philosophy, seeking meaning and wisdom in the very pain he endured, and from this came amor fati. For Nietzsche, amor fati meant not just accepting life as it is, but loving it, passionately embracing it. The word “love” carries a deeper weight than simple resignation—it means an enthusiastic, full-hearted acceptance, a refusal to regret, to wish for things to be different, to think that we could have done more, chosen differently, or known better. Amor fati is about welcoming life as it comes, with all its highs and lows, its triumphs and its defeats, its moments of joy and its pangs of sorrow.

Nietzsche himself put it succinctly: “My formula for human greatness is amor fati—that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity—but to love it.” We are often trapped in the opposite mindset, lost in the illusion of hindsight, believing that with different choices, different actions, we might have achieved better outcomes. We dwell on regrets, wishing we could alter the course of our lives. While it’s true that there are countless alternative paths we could have taken, the reality is that, in this life we are living, we were constrained to the decisions we made, based on what we knew and how we felt at the time. The circumstances we face, shaped by those choices and the very fabric of existence, lie far beyond our ability to control.

To mourn the past or fantasize about rewriting it—this is to ignore the truth of our existence.