“It seems to often do more harm than good to live in resentment and disdain for the world around us.
The world we find ourselves in, its past and present, its people, and the rise and fall of its cultures and practices are all the way they are, they are not the way we personally want them to be.
When we resist the reality of the world around us and instead project onto it our expectation about how the world should be, we are often met with a certain level of internal resistance. Resistance that can cause us to suffer, and the greater the distance between reality and our expectation, the greater the resistance.
The world is what it is. It is not what we expect it to be. Learn to accept life, learn to love fate and all that it brings. This is the stoic princicple of Amor Fati. After all, fate has given us the ability to live, and to experience life.
Unfortunately, Amor Fati often gets confused with a passive, defeatist acceptance of the world around us, to accept the wrongs of the world and to lie down as we observe the passing of things we don’t agree with or the wrongdoing we see being committed.
But I believe this is a misunderstanding of the Stoic principle, acceptance of reality does not mean to submit to it.
It is simply learning the ability to see it objectively and accepting that, in this moment, that is the state of the world.
It is the ability to look at the things around us clearly, not through the lens of our own bias and expectations.
In doing so, we are better able to understand the situations around us, the reality of the situations we find ourselves in, unblinded by the lens of our own bias and expectations.
We then are able to more clearly understand what is within our control and what is not, and then to look to leverage that control to affect change first in ourselves, and then if possible, in the world around us for the better.”
This quote has been pulled from a video by Orion Philosophy.