A counter-intuitive way to transform obstacles The immeasurable power of Amor Fati, or “loving your fate”.
TopFX MARIA MERAMVELIOTAKI Marketing Manager
Hello George, welcome back to Game Changers. It has been a long time since your last appearance. George, you must be one of the most controversial personas in the financial industry. With a background in Economics, you’ve dealt with FX for quite a lot of years! You were in, you were out and have decided you can do without! But first things first. What got you in the FX in the first place?
My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.” Friedrich Nietzsche What is fate? Are we free to choose how our life will unfold or are all the events of our life predetermined? If you happen to be a supporter of “free will” over destiny, your instinctual response will be to resist the idea of cultivating acceptance towards the notion of fate. Even if you haven’t ever thought about the question of free will versus destiny, you will still resist the idea of loving all the adversities that life throws at you. Humans are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, and that’s what we try to accomplish most of the time. Amor Fati means “love of fate”. It describes an attitude where one sees whatever happens in life as good or at the very least as necessary. The idea of Amor Fati has been linked to Nietzsche but is also a concept central to Stoic Philosophy. Epictetus famously noted, “Don’t seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.”
GAME CHANGERS Issue #24
To understand Amor Fati in a better way, we must define what “fate” is. Fate is all these things that are beyond our control and happen without us exercising our free will. Examples of such events are our specific ethnic identity, the DNA we were born with, our personality traits, and the environment we were brought up. Additionally, we could count as fate the experiencing of unfortunate events that we never thought will come our way. These events can range from trivial to critical; someone cutting us in line, getting fired, a car accident that wasn’t our fault, an unexpected failure, losing someone we love, an illness, or any other kind of life struggle.
