Restoring Agency: Ideas From "The Courage To Be Disliked"

The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is one of the most interesting self-help books I've read. It is written as a dialogue between a youth and a philosopher, where the youth is attempting to convince the philosopher that his ideas are flawed.

The book is about the concepts of Adlerian psychology, a school of psychology developed by Alfred Adler. I enjoyed this book because it takes strong and controversial stances on many issues. It's not afraid to anger the reader and, as a result, can produce really thought-provoking ideas.

Here are some of the more notable concepts I took away from the book:

There is no such thing as trauma

The first, and maybe the most controversial, concept presented in The Courage To Be Disliked is that trauma does not exist. More specifically, the cause and effect relationship that many of us subscribe to does not exist.

The technical term for the cause and effect relationship in psychology is "etiology." When we think of mental illness and trauma, we typically look for the causes of these problems and use those to explain present symptoms. For example, if someone's parents had a messy divorce, we might use that to explain why they are reluctant to enter relationships in the present. The cause is divorce, and the effect is poor relationships later in life.

Kishimi and Koga deny this. They argue that we make of our experiences whatever suits us. Adler says:

So, instead of the divorce causing poor relationships, Adlerian psychology says that this person has chosen to have poor relationships and is using their childhood experiences as a post hoc justification.

This sounds extreme and somewhat problematic, but I think it encourages a critical shift in thinking. The key idea is that we get to determine the meaning of our experiences. Past events obviously influence the present—we are just a collection of our past moments—but past events do not determineanything.

This is in contrast to a lot of current rhetoric around mental health and trauma. The conventional way of thinking takes away agency, while Adlerian psychology frames experiences in a way that gives you complete agency. It isn't arguing that to snap out of depression, you should just bE hApPy. Rather, it encourages a mode of thinking where imagining and realizing more positive futures is easier.

Unhappiness is a choice

Through the dialogue, the philosopher and the youth conclude that unhappiness is wanting our circumstances to be different from what they are.

However, the philosopher argues that unhappiness is a choice that every unhappy person makes at some point in their life. Similar to trauma, people choose unhappiness because they feel it suits them in some way, not because they were put into an unhappy situation.

We can all observe some of this behavior in our own lives. There are times when I exaggerate or lean into unhappiness because a part of me enjoys it. In their podcast episode discussing The Courage To Be Disliked, Ali and Taimur bring up the example of sad playlists. There is a level of catharsis and coping that comes with the "woe is me" sentiment.

The key idea here is that unhappy situations or circumstances aren't the reason for unhappiness. Unhappiness is a result of how we interpret our circumstances. The idea is closely related to principles in stoicism, namely that while we can't determine what happens to us, we can choose our reaction, which will ultimately determine the meaning of events.

The separation of tasks

The separation of tasks is one of the most useful concepts I've taken away from the book. The idea is to only be concerned with your own tasks. Your own tasks are what you need to do to accomplish your own goals. Other people's tasks are everything else. The authors argue that problems in life arise when the separation of tasks is blurred and people become concerned with tasks that are not theirs.

The key insight for me came when the authors pointed out that what other people think of me is not my task. I have a task to do what's best for me, but what other people think is not something to worry about. Many of the problems in my life come from being overly concerned with what other people think.

This ties into the book's title, the courage to be disliked. To be free and truly happy, you need the courage to be disliked. I think it's fine to not want to be disliked, but everyone will be disliked at some point—it's the way we respond to disapproval from others that determines how free we are.

The courage to be disliked is similar to the idea of disagreeableness, a term I first encountered in Revisionist History. In psychology, disagreeableness is a personality trait that describes someone who doesn't need approval from others to determine what is correct. While it sounds like a negative trait, Malcolm Gladwell thinks people should be more disagreeable and even claims it is a "precondition for doing things that are extraordinary."1

How to live

Regardless of whether the ideas in Adlerian psychology are grounded in science, they offer valuable ways of thinking. If internalized, the mindsets that are presented can be powerful methods of leveraging our emotions to serve our goals.

The title of the book captures my main takeaway. To be happy and lead a meaningful life requires a level of discomfort. We will have to face difficult truths and conduct honest self-reflection. We will need to scrutinize the stories we tell ourselves and the identities we have constructed. In the process, we may discover that we are the one's holding ourselves back.