There are few greater minor frustrations than flight cancellations. I’ll probably be stuck in Dallas for two days because of a storm warning in the northeast, and the worst part is that if I’d been a little sharper I could have beaten the storm - the flight immediately before mine was not cancelled; I could have switched to it earlier in the day and gotten home before the warning took effect.
Spinozist amor fati is valuable at times like this. If I grasp the (supposed) fact that everything is determined, I see and feel that there’s nothing I could have done to make that earlier flight. Everything had to happen the way that it did, and my negative emotions about the event are tied to a false belief that things could have been otherwise. I attain an intellectual joy by understanding that, in the chain of causation, there’s nothing I could have done.
How far can this principle be scaled up? At the highest level it implies that nothing we do is free, such that we ought to blame no one for any wrong doing and accept nature’s senseless raw power with no judgment. But this seems to fail to take into account that at some level we obviously are free, due to the possibility of deliberating and making decisions. Nature’s determinism seems to have nothing to do with it. This freedom seems to be of paramount importance. But if it is, then there isn’t much consolation for having missed a flight due to failure to deliberate and decide properly.