Amor Fati sounds beautiful in Latin.

Translated, it means love your fate. All of it — the good decisions and the catastrophic ones, the years that built you and the years that tried to break you. Love the whole thing. Wouldn't change a moment.

It's a lot easier to say than to live.

Here's what my fate actually looked like, for the record.

Moved to the Gold Coast at 18 with one suit and three shirts. Nine months of failing at telesales while everyone around me made their numbers. A demotion that felt, at the time, like the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to me. Then the obsession — 3am kitchen table, coffee, sales books, rehearsing scripts until my roommates could hear me talking in my sleep.

First million at 21. Lost everything at 22. Business partner disappeared with the money, left the debt in my name, and I was suddenly $250,000 under with a one-year-old daughter and no income and no idea what came next.

I know what the couch weeks feel like. The not shaving. The video games and movies because getting up required more than I had. The searching for coins in the cushions to buy bread and milk. The specific emptiness of being broken rather than just broke.

Then real estate. Then fifty business ideas that went nowhere — apparel lines, chauffeur driving, ecommerce, lawn mowing, things I've half forgotten. Then Yakk, started from a spare bedroom with $50 and a one-month-old in the next room, cold calling strangers, staring at the ceiling at night wondering if I'd made another massive mistake.

Nobody was loving their fate during any of that.

Not in real time.

Marcus Aurelius had it hard in ways that don't get talked about enough.

He buried multiple children. He spent more of his reign at war than at home. He governed an empire through one of the worst plagues in Roman history. He was betrayed by people he trusted. He inherited a job he hadn't asked for and carried it until it killed him.

The Meditations weren't written by a man who had found peace. They were written by a man in the middle of the worst years of his life, trying to think his way through them one day at a time. He wasn't loving his fate when he put those words down. He was trying to. The journal was the attempt, not the arrival.

That's the part that doesn't get said enough about Amor Fati.

It's not a feeling you achieve. It's a direction you keep moving in.

Here's what actually happens, in practice.

You don't love it while it's happening. You survive it. You get up the next day and do the next small thing — not because you've embraced your fate or found the right mindset, but because the alternative is worse and going home was never an option.

And then years later you look back at the whole thing. The couch. The debt. The demotion. The fifty failures. The restarts. The nights staring at the ceiling. And you realise, with something that isn't quite surprise but feels close to it, that you wouldn't change any of it.

Not because it was good. Because it was yours.

Because without every single piece of it — including the pieces that tried to break you, especially those — you don't get here. Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels into something unrecognisable.

There's a simpler version of all of this that cuts through the Latin and the philosophy.

You can't change it anyway.

So the only real question is what you do with it. Whether you carry the hard years like a weight or like a foundation. Whether the thing that tried to break you becomes the reason you stayed broken or the reason you're still here.

Marcus chose the latter. Every day, in a journal nobody was supposed to read, in the middle of wars and plague and grief and betrayal.

That's all Amor Fati actually is. Not loving the pain while it's happening. Just refusing, eventually, to wish it away.

My life is my life.

It's what made me who I am.

I can't change it.

So why would I want to.

Love it all.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson