The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga — Why Freedom Starts With Letting Go of Approval

What if your past doesn't decide who you are? What if the anger, anxiety, or shyness that seems to come from your childhood is actually something you're choosing, right now, because it serves a purpose? And what if the main thing standing between you and happiness is your need for other people to approve of you? These are the uncomfortable questions at the heart of The Courage to Be Disliked, a book that became a major bestseller in Japan before reaching English-language readers in 2018. It has since sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, according to its US publisher. It was written by Ichiro Kishimi, a philosopher who has spent much of his career studying and teaching the ideas of the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, and Fumitake Koga, a professional writer. Adler was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but he is far less widely known today. This book is an attempt to bring his ideas to a general audience. It does so in an unusual way. The whole book is a conversation, spread over five nights, between a philosopher and a frustrated young man who thinks the world is complicated and that happiness is beyond his reach. The young man arrives determined to prove the philosopher wrong. Over the five nights, he argues, gets angry, storms out, and keeps coming back. Your past doesn't determine your present The book's first and most provocative idea is a rejection of what it calls etiology: the habit of explaining our behaviour through past causes. Most of us assume that we are anxious because of something that happened to us, or angry because of how we were raised. Adlerian psychology, as the philosopher presents it, takes a different view, called teleology. Instead of asking what caused a feeling, it asks what purpose the feeling serves. The book's best-known example is a young man who never leaves his room. The usual explanation is that anxiety keeps him inside. The philosopher turns this around: perhaps he creates the anxiety because he has already decided not to go out, and the anxiety gives him a reason. This doesn't mean the past didn't happen, or that painful experiences don't matter. The point is that experiences don't automatically determine what we do next. We give them meaning, and the meaning we give them is something we can change. "No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure," the philosopher says. That is both a heavy responsibility and a kind of freedom. All problems are interpersonal problems The book's second big idea is that most of our difficulties are closely connected to our relationships with other people. Feelings of inferiority, envy, loneliness and anxiety are often shaped by how we see ourselves in relation to others. The philosopher takes this argument further, suggesting that if we were truly alone in the universe, most of these problems would not exist. This leads to a useful distinction between a feeling of inferiority and an inferiority complex. Everyone feels inferior sometimes, and that feeling can push us to grow. It becomes a complex when we use it as an excuse: "I can't do that because I'm not clever enough" or "because I didn't go to a good school." The book also describes the superiority complex as the other side of the same coin, a way of acting as if you are better than others to cover up a feeling that you aren't. Healthy striving, in this view, means comparing yourself with your past self, not with other people. Life is not a competition. The separation of tasks The book's most practical tool is what it calls the separation of tasks. When you face a problem, ask whose task it is. A simple test is to ask who ultimately bears the consequences of the choice. Whether you study for an exam is your task. Whether your colleague likes your work is their task. How your friend reacts to your decision is their task. Much of our unhappiness, the book argues, comes from trying to control other people's tasks or letting others interfere in ours. A parent who constantly pushes a teenager to study is stepping into the child's task. Someone who shapes every decision around what others will think is handing their own task to everyone else. This distinction does not mean ignoring your responsibilities towards others. It means recognising where your responsibility ends and another person's choices begin. This is where the title comes from. If you live trying to satisfy everyone's expectations, you'll never be free. Living by your own values means that some people will dislike you, and the philosopher argues that being willing to accept that is a sign that you are living freely. As he puts it, the courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked. Equal relationships, not praise or rebuke In the Adlerian approach presented in the book, healthy relationships are horizontal: equal, rather than organised around one person being above another. The philosopher argues that praise and rebuke can reinforce vertical relationships, where one person judges another from a position of authority. Instead of praising, it suggests encouragement and simple gratitude, such as saying "thank you" for someone's help. Being thanked helps people feel that they are useful to others, which the book sees as the foundation of courage and self-worth. Community feeling and contribution The goal of all this is what Adler called community feeling: a sense that you belong and that other people are your comrades, not your enemies. The book argues that belonging doesn't come from being liked or admired. It comes from contributing to others. Even if no one notices or thanks you, feeling that you are of use to someone is enough to give your life meaning. Living in the here and now The final night turns to how to live. The philosopher compares life to a dance rather than a journey towards a destination. If you treat life as a line from where you are to where you want to be, everything before the goal becomes a mere stepping stone. If you treat it as a series of moments, each moment is complete in itself. He also argues that there is value in having the courage to be ordinary, rather than feeling you must be special, either especially good or especially bad, to have a place in the world. What to keep in mind The book's ideas are challenging and often genuinely liberating, particularly the separation of tasks, which many readers find they can use straight away. The dialogue format also lets the authors raise the obvious objections through the young man, so the book rarely feels like it's dodging hard questions. But a few things are worth knowing. The format isn't for everyone. Some readers find the back-and-forth repetitive and the young man's constant objections tiring, and wish the arguments were made more directly. The claim that trauma doesn't determine the present needs careful reading. The book challenges the idea that past experiences must dictate how we live today. That can be an empowering perspective, but its strongest statements can sound dismissive of the lasting effects of trauma. Modern psychology recognises that traumatic experiences can have long-term psychological and physical consequences. For someone dealing with trauma, this book is not a substitute for professional help. Finally, this is Kishimi and Koga's presentation of Adler's ideas, in a deliberately philosophical style. It is not a clinical or research-based account of psychology, and some of its boldest claims are meant to provoke reflection rather than to be taken as scientific rules. So is it worth reading? Yes. The Courage to Be Disliked is one of the most thought-provoking self-help books of the last decade, and it deserves its reputation. Its central ideas, that you can change the meaning of your past, that other people's opinions are their task and not yours, and that belonging comes from contributing rather than being approved of, are simple to state and surprisingly powerful in practice. You may not agree with every argument the philosopher makes. The young man doesn't either. But the book's real value is that it makes you question assumptions you didn't know you had, and it reminds you that the freedom to live your own life comes with the risk that not everyone will like it.