The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

It is the classic lesson: the Chinese finger trap, the Tao in Taoism, Nirvana in Buddhism, the silence of Wittgenstein; the harder one tries, the harder one flails, the more entrenched one becomes.

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 . . . but love it.

Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say yes, I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?

The concept that Watts is discussing here is what he referred to as the backwards law (originating from Taoism), which argues that the more one tries to remove or escape the negative experience of life, the more negative it becomes. Rather, the more one faces it willingly and intentionally, the stronger and more equipped one becomes—the more meaningful and positive the pain and hardship can be made to feel.

What we can know, though, is that our existence, although a seemingly insignificant fluke in a blip of time, through the butterfly effect, will fan out and leave a legacy with potentially increasingly dramatic effects for the rest of history.