The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness Paperback – May 7, 2024

Offers a very clear view of things that give energy to the reader. I love the part where it denies the effect of trauma, how what we take out of an incident has a bigger impact than the incident itself. This book gives the responsibility, thereby the power unto the individual itself, so that he or she can alter their life as they please.

Two fictional characters, Youth and Philosopher, have a long engaging set of conversations regarding Adlerian psychology in The Courage to be Disliked.Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler were three pioneers in the field of psychology, with Adler being the least famous of the three.I am not wild about the narrative dialog format of this book. That said, I can see that the book might be dry if it were written in a textbook format.Five main themes stood out for me:1. Separation of tasks2. All problems are interpersonal relationship problems3. Community creates a sense of belonging4. Relationships should be horizontal and not vertical5. Stay focused on the here and now, not the past or the futureIn separation of tasks, you ask yourself whose task is this. If it is yours, then you take care of it. Don’t worry about how they perceive you doing your task. If the tasks belong to others, then you provide space for them to complete their tasks.All problems are interpersonal relationship problems. According to Adlerian philosophy, “if all interpersonal relationships were gone from this world, which is to say if one were alone in the universe and all other people were gone, all manner of problems would disappear.” All problems revolve around relationships with others.Our community provides a sense of belonging because none of us can exist as a singular entity. You use goods and services provided by others. As long as you can feel that you are of use to someone else, then you can feel from your own subjective viewpoint that you are making contributions to others, and that provides a sense of your worth.Relationships should be horizontal and not vertical where there are no praises or rebukes. Praise or Rebukes imply that a hierarchical relationship exists because a person has the power to either praise or rebuke. You should strive to be equal with all others.We cannot change the past, and the future is an abstraction. Worrying about either is wasteful. Life is a series of moments called “now.” And we can only live in the here and now. Despite the wishes of some, life is not linear progression. Instead, life progresses as a series of dots.By the end of the book, I found myself grasping to recall everything that I read and to put it into an easily understood mental model. While the book made sense while reading it, by the end, I had forgotten some of the material I read earlier. I just cracked open The Courage to be Happy. From the brief amount that I have read, it seems to reinforce the material covered in The Courage to be Disliked.Because this book made me think more about relationships, I highly recommend The Courage to be Disliked.

Tough to go through.... to be honest...... It's a discussion between a young person and a philosopher. The discussions make a lot of sense though.

The thing that I love most about this book is that living life as a dance without thinking about the destination is the thing. Focusing on the present and understanding that to be of service to others and to see others as your comrade is the key to happiness and learning how to communicate well while also understanding that all problems in our lives are massed interpersonal problems. I absolutely love this book.

I absolutely loved this book! It causes you to be very accountable for your life’s choices and thoughts. That everything is a choice. And that every single person has a different world view and we cannot impose our world view (or personality) onto others. There is so much freedom in this book for a more fulfilling life.I thought the dialogue form would be hard to read, but it was delightful.

One of the more interesting points made in this book is the difference between etiology, the Freudian excavation of the past as cause of the present, and teleology, the Adlerian refocus on the goals of our present behaviors. While how we got to the present can be explained by past experiences, including our traumas, how we use that past today depends on what we want to achieve, our goals. For example, when a child who has been the center of attention during a protracted serious illness becomes well, he might sabotage his wellness in order to regain the attention and caregiving he received during his illness. In other words, he will choose a hypochondriac lifestyle not because he’s still ill, but because his goal is to continue to be taken care of; he mines the past to facilitate a desired present and future. Most of us can probably think of friends or family members who wallow in the past as a means of controlling the present.It's insights like the etiology/teleology dichotomy that make this book of considerable interest. But a word of caution: the situations discussed by the authors are typical of a certain class of people, those who are materially comfortable and secure enough to be able to indulge in such self-help thinking, but not helpful to people who have suffered genuine physical trauma, such as sexual molestation as children, or who face genuine suffering in the present, such as the citizens of Kiev or the parents of the victims of serial killers or the soldiers suffering from PTSD. There is genuine suffering in the world, and it is false to say that such people make their own traumas. Trauma does exist, contrary to the authors’ assertion otherwise.Whence this rather Pollyanna-ish worldview? Perhaps the setting is the clue: the book-lined study of a philosopher, complete with fountain pen and handwritten manuscript, who has withdrawn from the competitive world outside. The perfect place for theory to prevail.

5 stars! This book has a ton of great insights to change your perspective on choosing to happy and what defines a happy life. Definitely one of my favorite books! i recommend this book to everyone