I picked this book up in the bookstore the other day, Dear Readers, because The courage to be disliked: a single book can change your life grabbed me with its title. For a people-pleaser at heart, it’s really inspiring to think about how to court being disliked and feel OK about it. It’s also an imperative if you want to wipe “pick me” off your forehead so the psychopaths and narcissists of this world pass you up for another victim.
I have to admit, I was curious but dubious because any by-line that claims a single book can change your life seems too good to be true. To be sure, the authors realise this too, and the whole book is a conversation that plays on this suspicion.
So, let me tell you what’s good and bad about The courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, as well as my observations about how to avoid living someone else’s life by releasing the fear of being disliked.
The Good
Kishimi and Koga replicate a dialogue that they themselves undertook so that Koga could better understand Kishimi’s interpretation of psychology according to Alfred Adler, a peer of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Koga became obsessed with the writings and philosophy of Adler through a book that he stumbled upon years earlier, in which Kishimi overturns everyday Japanese wisdom with pithy simplifications of Adler’s thinking. The by-line of The courage to be disliked reflects this moment in Koga’s life and thinking, and communicates the hope that their book will also change their readers’s lives in a moment.
Kishimi and Koga make good on their promise to relay complex Adlerian psychology and philosophy in simple terms. This is a very readable book that you can power through in an afternoon thanks to the easy language. The examples used are also very relatable making the book accessible without the need to have any prior academic training.
There are certainly a number of simple and pithy statements that ring true in the book. For example:
- Each of us lives in a subjective world that we ourselves give meaning to.
- If we change, the world will change.
- We don’t change because the way we are living now serves specific goals that we are attached to.
- Life is not a competition; it’s enough to keep moving forward without comparing yourself to anyone other than your ideal self.
- One cannot change what one is born with. But one can, under one’s own power, go about changing what use one makes of that equipment.
- At their root, all problems are interpersonal problems that can be solved by knowing whose task is whose, and not intruding on other people’s tasks in the three domains of love, friendship, and work.
The philosopher in the conversation makes many claims (56 in total) and attempts to back them up against challenges from his interlocutor. For this purpose, they conduct their conversation through the use of scenarios from everyday life. However, the scenarios seem overly simplistic and cherry-picked to prove the claims in ways that do not admit alternative interpretations. And here lies the oppressive power of the blanket statements throughout the book because they contain an element of truth that is void of nuance and context.
The Bad
The introduction to The courage to be disliked feels like a set-up. The philosopher tells us that the reason the world appears to be a “chaotic mass of contradictions” is because we make the world complicated when, in fact, it is simple. It’s a circular argument that you can’t get around. Consistently, the philosopher will remind the youth that the problem lies with him (the youth) overcomplicating things and not with what he (the philosopher) is saying per se.
It is no accident that the pronouns I’ve used so far are masculine. The book speaks purely in terms of men. Perhaps this is why the authors so confidently assert that we can freely act as ourselves when we recognise that we are equally as valuable as the next person. While I agree that we all have equal worth, as anyone who does not belong to an elite group of men can attest, in the real world we do not all have equal power, a point that seems to be overlooked. There are moments in which the statements take on a more neutral tone with the formal use of “one”, but you never forget that this is two men talking to one another about men and traditional male and female roles in heteronormative families. Additionally, the tone of the conversation comes across as supercilious while they try to outsmart one another, making the reader feel like the writers are superior.
Although the philosopher appears to be answering the youth’s questions about how to change, be happy and free, set boundaries, and have the courage to be disliked while also belonging to the community, this is really a utopian thought experiment more than a practical guide. There is no research to back up the claims, and little acknowledgement of the pitfalls you can encounter or the consequences that you may face as you try to implement the advice. There are no signposts for evaluating if you are succeeding, and the book contains a hyperbolic promise that anyone can change and be happy right now just by altering how they think and what they value. It’s as simple as deciding that your past does not exist and neither does the future! Live in the here and now as yourself.
The How To
Avoid Living Someone Else’s Life
“When one seeks recognition from others, and concerns oneself with how one is being judged by others, in the end, one is living other people’s lives.” Wow, that is a powerful invitation for putting people-pleasing behind me and daring to do what I think is right even in the face of the possibility I may be disliked.
In practical terms, the authors put forward an effective and useful recommendation for living your own life rather than someone else’s: know which tasks belong to you and which ones belong to others, and only perform your own tasks. I didn’t specifically go out looking for a situation to practice this for my blog post—I just got thinking about a serious situation where knowing whose task was whose worked for me.
My manager of a few years back was insecure and used many gaslighting tactics to make their direct reports feel inferior. Shortly after I joined the team, a team member entered into a heated confrontation with our manager, including a nasty grievance process with Human Resources, after which they eventually quit. The team member shared some of their experience with me and I told them they weren’t imagining things because our manager had done some similar things to me. The team member asked me to share these things with HR too and fight their battle with them, or perhaps even for them, so our manager would have to leave. At the time, I felt I did not have enough evidence and that it was not my fight to fight. I believed that the correct response in the moment was to let the person know that they were not crazy and that what they shared was believable.
Thanks to witnessing what happened to my co-worker, I realised that my task on my own behalf was to document anything untoward that happened in my relationship with my manager. I knew I was documenting these moments to help keep me sane and not let my manager get inside my head. Unfortunately, a moment arrived in which it was clear my manager was sabotaging me and I used my documentation to alert the relevant people higher up in the organisation. The organisation has a policy to not force people to lodge a grievance against their will, so while the higher-ups asked me to do so, I declined. I realised that I was not being paid enough to get rid of this toxic manager, and that I did not have the power to do so anyway. I knew that if we went through a grievance process, even if the organisation found in my favour, my bridges with my employer would be burned and both my manager and I would have to find work elsewhere. I was not in the business of destroying anybody.
The higher-ups respected my decision to refrain from lodging a grievance, but they also knew that my manager was a problem and they had to do something about it. They moved me onto a new team and promised that I would never have to work directly with the manager who sabotaged me. Thankfully, they made good on that promise and I never worked directly with the toxic manager again. It is very uncomfortable to bump into them form time to time, and we actively dislike one another although we treat one another cordially when our paths cross.
When I chose not to launch a grievance because I felt it was not my job to get rid of my manager, I was in essence saying that my manager’s manager and HR had their own jobs to do. I chose not to live their lives for them, and only live my life which at that moment was to take care of my own employment and experience of employment. This was the same situation when I refused to get embroiled in my co-worker’s fight with our manager—I gave them the opportunity to live their life.
No matter how clear the tasks and roles in my story seem after the fact, at the time they were not. Regardless of what Koga and Kishimi claim, life is not simple. Additionally, as much as I strongly believe in justice, I chose not to fight alongside my co-worker and not to lodge my own grievance because I know that how people perceive me affects my future opportunities. And while it may make sense in theory that we will be free to act if we care less about what others think, it is a psychological reality that we understand ourselves through our relationships with others. Not only that, being seen and recognised is critical to our mental health and being able to move through the world.
Conclusion
The courage to be disliked comes across as a cheap trick that preys on recovering people pleasers with its catchy title. The whole book seems to be an exercise in juxtaposing two opposing views to prove a point using straw men, cherry-picking, blanket statements, and circular reasoning. It starts as a conversation that promises some insight into how to happily live your one true life but ends just offering reasons to adopt some catchy meme themes. That’s not to say there isn’t an element of validity or truth to some of the catchy meme themes. Those half-truths weren’t enough, though, to overcome my annoyance with the fallacious arguments and the lack of nuance. It also annoyed me that the book offered a seemingly universal solution to a universal problem, viz., how to be happy and free, in a very male-centred way. I feel certain the authors will defend their exclusion of the rest of us through omission by saying they are exercising their freedom to be disliked!
If negative stars were part of my rating scale, the categories I use to rate all the books I review would produce a minus 1. Instead, I’ve given this book no stars. But, if you’re searching for examples of fallacious reasoning for a paper you are writing on rhetoric, your search is over.