Amor Fati

You don't have to love it but it's gonna happen anyway

In fund management and in life, there’s two levels of stoicism: offensive and defensive.

There’s the surface-level read, which treats stoicism as a way to do “damage control” in your life. And sure, that’s great. It’s totally useful. No slam on damage control.

The upshot of that philosophy is you’re using stoicism to not panic, control what you can, and let go of the rest. It’s useful, but it’s playing defense.

The Stoics didn’t invent the phrase “Amor Fati”. Nietzsche coined it in Book IV of The Gay Science (1882), and later called it his “formula for greatness in a human being” in Ecce Homo. I know, It sounds like something chiseled on a Roman wall around 180 AD, but the label’s 19th century German philosophy.

Context matters here, too. He wrote it during a rare upswing.

He had a period of renewed vitality in Genoa, feeling creatively alive after years of poor health. Later that same year he met a woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé, became totally infatuated, proposed marriage twice. She rejec…