Your story is your material. Resentment is the enemy.
Amor fati is Latin for “love of fate.” The Stoics used it to mean something precise: not that everything that happens is good, but that you can choose to embrace your story, including the hard parts, instead of fighting them.
Your past, your starting point, your setbacks: they’re not mistakes to erase. They’re the raw material you have. And the only way to build something meaningful from here is to stop resenting where “here” came from.
I think about this a lot. I started in Nigeria, with the same constraints millions of young Africans face: limited access to quality education, uncertainty, and a system that wasn’t designed for scale. I got physiotherapy when I wanted medicine. I had to borrow a laptop to do my first paid design work. I had to fight for a scholarship, wait a year, and then fund myself to get to Russia when the government delayed our stipends.
I could look at all of that and feel cheated. Or I could look at it and say: this is the story I was given. What am I going to do with it? Amor fati is choosing the second.
Compare Yourself to Yourself
I’ve written before about how to build your life, about knowing where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there. Part of that is being honest about your starting point. But there’s a trap: we don’t just assess ourselves.
We compare ourselves. To the person who had more money. To the person who was born in a better country. To the person who got the promotion we wanted. And comparison, when it’s to others, is a recipe for resentment. You’ll always find someone who had it easier. You’ll always find someone who had it harder. Neither helps you move.
The useful comparison is you to you. What did you have? What did you do with it? Your pride should be in the fact that you’ve been able to do X with the amount you were given. If you started from nothing and built something: that’s a story. If you started with something and multiplied it: that’s also a story.
The point isn’t to rank yourself against the world. It’s to ask: am I moving? Am I building? Am I using what I have? That’s where amor fati meets practical life design. You love your story not because it was fair, but because it’s yours, and you’re still writing it.
Resentment Holds You Back
Here’s what happens when you don’t love your fate. You get stuck. You say: I’m so sad I didn’t get this. I’m terrible for not being further along. I was cheated. The system is rigged. All of that might be true in some sense. But once you make it your identity, you’re not just sad; you’re paralysed.
Resentment doesn’t create energy. It consumes it. You spend your time looking backward, not forward. You wait for an apology that may never come. You wait for the world to fix itself. And while you wait, you don’t build. So the real cost of resentment isn’t the bad feeling. It’s the life you don’t live because you’re too busy being angry at the one you’ve had.
Amor fati is the opposite. It’s saying: this happened. I didn’t choose it. But I can choose what I do next. I can use the difficulty as fuel. I can use the contrast, between what I had and what I built, as proof that I’m capable. That doesn’t mean you pretend the past was fine. It means you stop letting the past decide the future.
Love Your Story So You Can Move Forward
So love your story. Not in a shallow “everything happens for a reason” way. In a deep way: this is the only life I get. This is the only starting point I had. I can spend it resenting, or I can spend it building.
The people who move forward are the ones who’ve made peace with where they came from, not by forgetting it, but by using it. They know their context. They don’t compare themselves to people in completely different contexts. They compare themselves to themselves. And they take pride in the distance they’ve covered.
That’s amor fati. That’s the love of fate. And that’s how you turn a hard story into a strong one.