Amor Fati is a Latin phrase, meaning "love your destiny", and was used extensively by Nietzsche at a point in his writing, and Albert Camus expanded on it, about loving the hardships the same way we love when everything comes around as we want to.

Where does it comes from?

It is a mainstay of Stoicism, a philosophy that has endured ironically, the many tests time has put on humankind because it's the main teaching, is about focusing on what you can change, and let go of anything out of your "Scope" (pun clearly intended, this will be a tech blog sometimes after all)

Stoicism has been a major part of my adult life because life has a way of forcing you to acknowledge you are but a speck in the whole concept of eternity, and worrying about things outside of your control will do you no good.

And on our main journey on this existence, we only have one destiny, the moment we cross the gateway to whatever there is out there after this one.

So what does it leaves us if we are going to die anyway one day?

It leaves us with the journey, and everything must be cherished, because the good can't be distinguished from the bad if you never experienced either.

We must love our journey because it's the only thing that's truly ours during our lifetime. And any experience lived can be applied anywhere. Even in tech.

How could "Amor Fati" be used in tech?

It doesn't matter if you are 15 years into your career, or if you are just starting to play with "hello world!", you'll keep facing challenges, obstacles, roadblocks, and dead ends, and I'm not only talking about your career but in your personal life. Being a dev is quite a funny middle ground where you need your "creativity", not just for creating something out of the blue, but for solving problems in general. And to sharpen that skill, you need to work on real-life scenarios to move out of tutorial hell. And you need to keep loving those hardships, go looking for that "Eureka!!" moment, but never lose focus of your real life too.

Amor fati and Eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia is a concept that refers to Self-fulfillment as a human being, and many people correlate their career as being their whole self-fulfillment, and it's a yes and no on that. You need to be driven, but never see it as a tunnel vision, you need to charge batteries on your personal life, your health, your friends, to never lose your focus as a human being. I'll lose count of how many friends worked on great projects, sacrificed holidays and time with families, for products that never lasted more than a few months after launch.

Conclusion

After the whole balancing your act preach, my real conclusion would be to love your journey, because while it is our real only possession on this earth, it is better when shared and is driven with the purpose for the others. The journey you are embarking on each day, you'll never know the kind of impact on other person's quality of life, just because you decided to keep pushing on that side project that made someones else journey a little bit easier or more manageable. Give your effort an purpose, because when you balance your life, you don't think how many lines of code you refactored, but what kind of journey you have lived, and if what you are leaving behind, really mattered for anyone.

I'm a 29 year old dude, from México, who just began three journeys this year.

First, i proposed to the love of my life, Mine, just in March, and that's a journey i've been looking forward for a long time. I felt the right time was coming, went to purchase a ring, with the blessing of my mother in law, and kept it for a couple of months waiting for the right moment.

Second, i began working as a CTO for Skysset, a startup based in Monterrey, México. I met Antonio, the founder, because one of my best friends, Argel was working as manager of sales and thought i would be a great fit. When i spoke with Antonio, it was supposed to be a 20 minutes talk, not even an interview, and we spent 3 hours talking about everything, from his vision, up to mindfulness too. On the spot i told him i wanted to be a part of his team, and two weeks later, i was part if it. This was early April.

Third, i began feeling some weird things by February of this year, but i assumed it was normal, since i was working out, eating healthy, and lost a decent amount of weight since the last year, but suddenly it was a drastic drop, and began feeling a small bump on my abdomen, that coincided with lower back pain. By April 27th, Mine ordered a imaging study, and instead of a Hernia, it was found that a adenopathy was taking a large place of my lower abdomen. The next day a biopsy was taken and by the end of the week, i was officially diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, that thankfully, has a high cure rate, and was staged as Stage 2B.

Having said this, my story is just one of many about the people building things, and their reasons for working so hard building amazing things while dealing with life at the same time.

In this space i'll try to talk about software development, management, ways to deal with pressure, life in general and about trying to put things in perspective, since i'm seeing a lot of my colleagues sacrificing their health, pursuing their goals, and that's something that should be balanced, because there's no point in working so hard, if you and your beloved ones can't enjoy it.