Amor Fati: Why You Shouldn't Regret Anything
Imagine someone tells you that you have to relive your entire life. Every moment, every mistake, every triumph. Time after time, for all eternity.
What would you change?
I sat with this question for a while. The honest answer surprised me: nothing.
Love your fate
Nietzsche called this amor fati, love of fate. It’s not tolerance, it’s not acceptance, it’s love.
“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.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Read that again. He’s not saying make peace with it, he’s saying want nothing to be different. That’s a much harder ask.
The best decision you could have made
Regret is built on a lie, the lie that you could have known better.
Every decision you ever made was the best decision you could have made given the information you had and the state of mind you were in. You weren’t the person you are today. You didn’t have what hindsight gave you. You were someone else, navigating with a different map.
Regretting a past decision is like blaming your ten-year-old self for not understanding calculus. That person didn’t have the tools, but they did their best.
Maybe
There’s a Zen parable about a farmer that I keep coming back to.
His horse runs away. The neighbors say, “How terrible!” The farmer says, “Maybe.”
The horse returns with wild horses. “How wonderful!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” the farmer replies.
His son breaks his leg taming one of the wild horses. “How terrible!” they say. The farmer says, “Maybe.”
The army drafts young men for war. The son, with his broken leg, is spared. “How wonderful!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” replies the farmer.
That single word dismantles the entire framework of good and bad. You can’t know. The thing that wrecked you might be the thing that saved you. The opportunity you missed might have led somewhere worse. The chain of cause and effect stretches further than any of us can see.
So what exactly are you regretting?
Forward, not backward
I think about this constantly as a founder. Every day is a stream of decisions made with incomplete information under time pressure. Should we build this feature or that one? Should we pursue this market? Should we have moved faster six months ago?
The temptation to look backward is enormous. But every minute spent relitigating the past is a minute stolen from the future. Regret doesn’t just feel bad, it’s actively wasteful.
Nietzsche had something to say about this too:
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
A Yes-sayer. Not someone naive or passive, but someone who has decided to point all their energy in one direction: forward.
The eternal recurrence test
This is the test I use now. When I make a hard call, the kind that keeps you up at night, I ask myself: if I had to live with this decision for eternity, could I love it?
Not just tolerate it, but actually love it.
If yes, I commit. If no, I dig deeper into why.
And for the decisions already made? They’re done. The person who made them did their best. The farmer would say “maybe” about all of them. I choose to say yes.