A few months ago I went to visit two dear friends in a small town in Massachusetts. At some point, I don’t remember the specific occasion, I said, “it is what it is,” intending to indicate the inevitability of whatever it was that we were talking about.
One of my friends promptly commented: “I hate that phrase, it’s so overused.” Indeed, it is. And yet, it perfectly embodies the Stoic notion that we need to accept reality, however unpleasant it may be, because, as the sci-fi author Philip K. Dick once said:
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” (How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)
Indeed, modern Stoic author Larry Becker, in his A New Stoicism, rephrased the famous ancient Stoic motto, “live according to nature” as “follow the facts,” instead of indulging in fantasies and wishful thinking.
But I had to agree with my friend, “it is what it is” is pretty trite, not to mention logically tautological. So I started thinking of alternatives, phrases that convey the same message, that could be used as a kind of Stoic mantra, and yet that are a little more interesting.
My first attempt was simply to translate “it is what it is” directly into Latin, and then look at whether some classical author, ideally a Stoic, had actually used it. The translation comes to id est quod est, and it’s nowhere to be found in the ancient literature, likely for the good reason that it sounds very clunky. In classical texts, id est is almost always used as a functional bridge (meaning “that is”) to explain a previous statement, not at the beginning of a sentence. Moreover, id est quod est would feel like a sentence fragment looking for a purpose. It lacks the punchy, resigned weight the English phrase carries today.
Okay, but now I was on a quest, so I kept digging. One possibility was a phrase from Seneca: Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt, meaning “The fates lead the willing, but drag the unwilling.” It’s found in the 107th letter to Lucilius, and actually refers to a phrase by the second head of the Stoa, Cleanthes (the original, of course, being in Greek). So good pedigree and interesting concept, but definitely not rolling off one’s tongue!
