The Courage to Be Disliked

The Courage to Be Disliked is a Japanese analysis of the work of 19th-century psychologist Alfred Adler, who established that happiness lies in the hands of each human individual and does not depend on past traumas.

The key word in Freudian psychology is ‘trauma.’ It asserts that most of our self-image takes deep root in our psyche at a young age. Therefore, bad experiences then will lead to much trouble later. As a result, Freud assumed most of our adult lives is spent trying to fight, unravel, and overcome our limiting beliefs from the past.

According to Adler, this isn’t true. While he agreed that we form a style of life early on, whether that’s being an optimist or a pessimist, for example, he didn’t believe this was a fixed point of our character. Adler defended the idea that we can change who we are in any given moment.

Even if you could trace all your flaws back to two or three instances in your childhood, so what? You can only change them now, in the present. You have to believe that something different can happen in order to break old patterns. And you can choose that new outlook at any time.

So why not choose it right now?

One of the author’s students once admitted that he disliked himself because he was too aware of his own flaws. Adler categorized such flaws into two categories: objective and subjective inferiorities. Objective ones are those we can measure and confirm, like being shorter than someone else or having less money. In contrast, we fabricate subjective inferiorities.

While talking to the student, Kishimi too realized that the flaws the young man saw weren’t real. In essence, he made up reasons to hate himself in order to seek isolation from others and, thus, avoid getting hurt. His loneliness was the cause of his misery, not the effect of any actual shortcomings.

Adler said the only inferiorities we have to actively deal with are the objective ones, and only if they really hinder us in reaching our goals. But the subjective ones aren’t even there, so be sure to probe them before you deem yourself unworthy.

One wonderful antidote to this problem is, as author Kamal Ravikant puts it, to Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.

In one of my most popular posts, I wrote: This is something Adler would agree with. He saw competitive societies as detrimental to our mental health and well-being. Today, this is a prominent topic in debates around Western vs. Eastern culture. Countries like Japan and China also have competition, but are, overall, more focused on cooperation, whereas nations like the US and Germany really focus on…