The Courage to be Disliked: The Japanese phenomenon that shows you how to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness

by Ichiro Kishimi

You may know this, but well water stays at pretty much the same temperature all year round, at about 18 degrees. That is an objective number—it stays the same to everyone who measures it. But when you drink the water in the summer it seems cool and when you drink the same water in the winter it seems warm. Even though it’s the same water, at the same 18 degrees according to the thermometer, the way it seems depends on whether it’s summer or winter.

At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.

If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with ‘determinism’. Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable.

Think about it this way. Your friend had the goal of not going out beforehand, and he’s been manufacturing a state of anxiety and fear as a means to achieve that goal. In Adlerian psychology, this is called ‘teleology’.

The anxiety and fear your friend is feeling are real. On occasion, he might also suffer from migraines and violent stomach cramps. However, these too are symptoms that he has created in order to achieve the goal of not going out. YOUTH: That’s not true! No way! That’s too depressing! PHILOSOPHER: No. This is the difference between ‘aetiology’ (the study of causation) and teleology (the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause). Everything you have been telling me is based in aetiology. As long as we stay in aetiology, we will not take a single step forward.

Certainly, the Freudian view of trauma is fascinating. Freud’s idea is that a person’s psychic wounds (traumas) cause his or her present unhappiness. When you treat a person’s life as a vast narrative, there is an easily understandable causality and sense of dramatic development that creates strong impressions and is extremely attractive. But Adler, in denial of the trauma argument, states the following: ‘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.’

We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.

The mother isn’t yelling in anger she cannot control. She is simply using the anger to overpower her daughter with a loud voice, and thereby assert her opinions.

‘People are not driven by past causes, but move toward goals that they themselves set’—that

‘The important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment.’ You want to be Y or someone else because you are utterly focused on what you were born with. Instead, you’ve got to focus on what you can make of your equipment.

The Greek word for ‘good’ (agathon) does not have a moral meaning. It just means ‘beneficial’. Conversely, the word for ‘evil’ (kakon) means ‘not beneficial’. Our world is rife with injustices and misdeeds of all kinds, yet there is not one person who desires evil in the purest sense of the word; that is to say something ‘not beneficial’.

In Adlerian psychology, we describe personality and disposition with the word ‘lifestyle’.

People can change at any time, regardless of the environments they are in. You are only unable to change because you are making the decision not to.

‘No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.’ That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life.

But don’t forget, it’s basically impossible to not get hurt in your relations with other people. When you enter into interpersonal relationships, it is inevitable that to a greater or lesser extent you will get hurt, and you will hurt someone, too.

Whatever the worry that may arise, the shadows of other people are always present.

‘feeling of inferiority’ is a term that has to do with one’s value judgement of oneself.

there is one good thing about subjectivity: it allows you to make your own choice.

We cannot alter objective facts. But subjective interpretations can be altered as much as one likes. And we are inhabitants of a subjective world.

When someone is insisting on the logic of ‘A is the situation, so B cannot be done’ in such a way in everyday life, that is not something that fits in the feeling of inferiority category. It is an inferiority complex.

In other words, you’re not equipped with the courage to change your lifestyle. It’s easier with things just as they are now, even if you have some complaints or limitations.

But as long as one continues to use one’s misfortune to one’s advantage in order to be ‘special’, one will always need that misfortune.

A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others, but from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.

Whatever differences we may have, we are all equal.

Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. You don’t want to be a loser. And you always have to keep on winning if you don’t want to be a loser. You can’t trust other people. The reason that so many people don’t really feel happy while they’re building up their success in the eyes of society is that they are living in competition. Because to them, the world is a perilous place that is overflowing with enemies.

A young friend of mine, when he was a teenager, used to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror arranging his hair. And once, when he was doing that, his grandmother said, ‘You’re the only one who’s worried how you look.’ He says that it got a bit easier for him to deal with life after that.

Irascible people do not have short tempers—it is only that they do not know that there are effective communication tools other than anger. That is why people end up saying things like ‘I just snapped’ or ‘he flew into a rage’. We end up relying on anger to communicate.

It’s only when we take away the lenses of competition and winning and losing that we can begin to correct and change ourselves.

First, there are two objectives for behaviour: to be self-reliant and to live in harmony with society. Then, the objectives for the psychology that supports these behaviours are the consciousness that I have the ability and the consciousness that people are my comrades.

One does not intrude on other people’s tasks.

You are the only one who can change yourself.

In short, that ‘freedom is being disliked by other people’.

The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked. When you have gained that courage, your interpersonal relationships will all at once change into things of lightness.

The mind and body are viewed as one, as a whole that cannot be divided into parts. Tension in the mind can make one’s arms and legs shake, or cause one’s cheeks to turn red, and fear can make one’s face turn white.

When one person praises another, the goal is ‘to manipulate someone who has less ability than you’. It is not done out of gratitude or respect.

In the first place, the feeling of inferiority is an awareness that arises within vertical relationships.

‘It is only when a person is able to feel that he has worth that he can possess courage.’

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.

That one can act on the community; that is to say, on other people, and that one can feel I am of use to someone. 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. It is at that point that, at last, we can have a true sense of our own worth. Everything we have been discussing about community feeling and encouragement connects here.

That reminds me of a line that the writer Kurt Vonnegut quoted in one of his books: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.’

Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.

Be earnest, but not too serious.