What we “see” is a mixture of two completely different streams of information — a top-down and a bottom-up one. One comes from sensory organs, the other from our expectations — and they can blend in the most bizarre ways.
When reality is very bad, when there is neither strength nor desire to engage with it, and there is a desperate longing and expectation for improvement and hope — then we begin to go blind. We stop seeing reality and start seeing our own desires, taking what is wished for as what is real.
This self-deception effect is well described in the writings of people who survived concentration camps (both Nazi and Soviet). Prisoners begin to believe that the guards actually sympathize with them and are completely on their side — only secretly. Their brain, like Skinner’s pigeon, begins to interpret the most ordinary gestures and words as hidden codes of support and sympathy. And the cruelty of the guards is interpreted by these prisoners as a form of disguise — fully justifying them. As if they are forced to be scoundrels, because otherwise they would be exposed, and in reality they are “good people.”
This effect generates extensive schizophrenic hypotheses and theories that are extremely harmful and dangerous.
In difficult situations, our psyche sometimes tries to escape reality: dissociation, denial, projection, depersonalization, and many other mechanisms. But this removes us from reality, and therefore reduces the effectiveness of everything we do. If you bury your head in the sand, the rest of the body remains above the surface — and in a more vulnerable position.
The principle of dispassionate acceptance of reality is one of the key practices of mindfulness, allowing one to escape the burden of past experience and avoid mirages and anxieties of the future.
“Acceptance does not mean that we cannot work to change the world or certain circumstances. But it does mean that until we accept things as they are, we will try to force things to be what they are not, and this can create numerous difficulties.” — J. Kabat-Zinn
But the Stoics went even further: they propose not just accepting reality, but loving it in any form.
As Epictetus wrote, one should bring one’s will into harmony with everything that happens, so that what happens does not happen against our will, and what does not happen is not experienced as something contrary to our desire. Those who fully internalize this live without failure in striving, without misfortune in avoidance, and without sadness, fear, or confusion.
The essence is to abandon the conflict between “expectation and reality,” to stop wasting energy on worry and regret, and to stop escaping into fantasies from frustrating reality. The belief that things must be the way we planned or wanted (MUSTurbation) is destructive to the psyche.
To love reality is not only to accept it, but even not to desire any other path than the one that exists now, and to perceive it as a challenge. Our anterior cingulate cortex constantly compares “reality” with “expectations, alternatives, possibilities” — and this directly influences dopamine levels. If you love what you have and what is around you now and do not want anything else, your dopamine tends to remain high. Thus, amor fati (love of fate) can make a person both happy and free, helping avoid regret and disappointment.
Stoicism is directed not toward self-love, but toward love of fate.
The Stoics believed that the main cause of human suffering is not events themselves, but resistance to them. The world is structured according to its own laws, and a person becomes calmer not by forcing reality to conform to desires, but by learning to live in agreement with it. That is why one of the central Stoic ideas was “living according to nature” — accepting the structure of the world, its limits, changes, aging, losses, and fate as part of the natural order of things.
The Stoics have a profound idea of amor fati — “love of fate.” This is not merely patience or resignation, but the ability to love reality itself as it is.
“Love the things that happen to you, for what could be more fitting for you?” — Marcus Aurelius
“Do not demand that events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do — and your life will be peaceful.” — Epictetus
“Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling.” — Seneca
For the Stoics, maturity is respect for reality. Not escape into illusions, not denial of facts, not endless struggle with the inevitable, but a clear gaze upon the world and working with what is actually there. They believed a person should direct effort only toward what is truly under their control: actions, character, discipline, attitude toward events. Everything else — external circumstances, opinions of others, chance, losses — should be accepted calmly, without internal war with reality.
Stoicism does not teach passivity. On the contrary, the Stoic acts actively, but without demanding that the world conform to his expectations. This is their understanding of inner strength: to see reality without distortion, not to run from it, and not to break against it.
Nietzsche wrote:
“Before fate catches us, we should lead it… but when it has caught us, we should try to love it.”
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: not wanting anything to be different, neither forward nor backward, nor for all eternity. Not merely to endure the inevitable, and even less to conceal it — since all idealism is a form of self-deception in the face of necessity — but to love it.”
What does this mean?
To love fate is not passive acceptance or refusal of change. It means maintaining engagement, attention, curiosity, gratitude, acceptance, and even approval toward everything that happens to you, precisely because it is a real fact of your existence. It means saying a slightly irrational, Dionysian “yes” to any reality.
Because acceptance of reality is also the first step toward understanding and changing it.