Notes on The Courage to Be Disliked
The book is a guide to Adlerian psychology in the form of Socratic dialogue between a philosopher and a young man. The setup felt a bit theatrical at first, but then I got hooked by the narrative because it reads like fiction.
Separation of tasks
This is the operationalized version of the Stoic dichotomy of control.
Epictetus: There are things we have full control over. There are things we don’t have any control over. You shouldn’t bother with the latter.
Adler: Your tasks belong to you. Other people’s tasks belong to them. Don’t invade other people’s tasks and don’t let them invade yours.
Adler’s version adds a usable test: whoever carries the consequences owns the task.
Let’s imagine that someone doesn’t like your appearance, your voice, or your humor. It is their task to process their emotions. When you try to be a people-pleaser, you invade their task (or try to control things that you don’t have any control over). Doing so would be a great waste of time and psychological energy.
At the end of the day, if someone dislikes you, that might be evidence you’re living according to your own values.
Community feeling
Adler thought that contributing to a community is what produces happiness and a sense of belonging. Importantly, it is the act of contributing itself that matters. You don’t need to be seen or praised to feel good. It is the internal feeling of making the world around you slightly better that brings that community sense.
“It is when one is able to feel I am beneficial to the community that one can have a true sense of one’s worth. […] Instead of feeling judged by another person as ‘good’, being able to feel, by way of one’s own subjective viewpoint, that I can make contributions to other people.”
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
Trauma doesn’t exist
No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
The risky literal read of that is: past events don’t matter, symptoms are just chosen meanings, healing is basically deciding differently. Modern science, though, views trauma as a stress-related condition that can involve durable changes in threat detection, memory, emotion regulation, and relationships. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) has been in ICD-11 since 2022, and the diagnosis explicitly includes damaged self-worth and relationships:
[…] Complex PTSD is characterised by severe and persistent 1) problems in affect regulation; 2) beliefs about oneself as diminished, defeated or worthless, accompanied by feelings of shame, guilt or failure related to the traumatic event; and 3) difficulties in sustaining relationships and in feeling close to others.
https://icd.who.int/browse/2024-01/mms/en#585833559">icd.who.int
This is especially true for children. A child doesn’t have much agency when she is trapped with the stressor. Her brain and identity are still forming. The adaptations that help her survive can become part of her identity — her nervous system gets wired in a particular way.
The book makes it look like your life is either fully determined by the past (Freud: trauma exists and fully shapes your life) or not determined at all (Adler: trauma doesn’t exist, you choose the meaning). A more balanced position is: your future isn’t mechanically determined by your past, but trauma certainly does exist and can shape your nervous system in durable ways; recovery involves retraining your nervous system and (this is where Adler’s position is correct) shifting toward behaviour change.
People fabricate anger
The book claims that people often fabricate anger to achieve their goals. That feels too neat. Anger usually arrives fast, before deliberation. Even Barrett’s “constructed emotions” school treats the process as automatic.
However, Adler is right that people may choose to recruit anger to achieve their goals. As a father, I can relate. I can recall getting angry on purpose just to stop my son from doing something I didn’t want him to do. The anger was real and I used it as a tool. The anger may be a short impulse for me, but the consequences can be long-term for him (and for our relationship).
More balanced take: anger is real and automatic just like any other emotion. What matters is what you do with it.
Some other things
Never praise. The claim is that praise is vertical, encouragement and gratitude are horizontal. I think the warning is useful, especially with children. Trait praise can make them fragile; process praise is safer because it points at effort, strategy, and choice (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9686450/">Mueller & Dweck, 1998). The instinct to be cautious with praising is right; it just needs calibration.
All problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Some problems are obviously biological, economic, or just random.
Again, both claims are too absolute in my opinion.
Conclusion
The book gives a few good pieces of advice. Separation of tasks and community feeling may improve your life. The danger is adopting the whole thing, because some parts are on the absolute end of the spectrum. I also think people who were traumatized in their childhood might find the book less enjoyable.
For me it landed in the same spot as “Four Thousand Weeks” did. Another reminder to stop chasing the future and look at the present, something I’ve nearly forgotten how to do since becoming a father and an immigrant.
The book is worth an evening despite being slightly controversial.