The Courage to Be Disliked

The Courage to Be Disliked

The staircase is narrow and steep. The young man climbs it slowly, gripping the wooden rail, his breath making small clouds in the cold Kyoto night air. At the top, behind a door that stands slightly ajar, lamplight spills onto stacks of books -- Greek philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, and tucked between them the collected writings of a nearly forgotten Viennese psychiatrist named Alfred Adler. The philosopher who lives here is not a therapist. He is not a self-help guru. He is a scholar who has spent decades reading Adler in the original German, turning the ideas over like stones, looking for what lives underneath.

The young man does not want to like what he is about to hear. He has come to argue. He is convinced, as most people are convinced, that the past shapes us, that trauma leaves permanent marks, that the unhappy person arrived at unhappiness through a chain of causes reaching back into childhood. He wants the philosopher to confirm this. He wants to be told that his life makes sense as a sequence of events, that who he is today follows logically from what was done to him.

What he gets instead, over five nights of relentless Socratic questioning, will dismantle almost everything he believes about the human mind.

Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga published "The Courage to Be Disliked" in Japanese in 2013. Koga is a journalist who spent years studying Adlerian psychology under Kishimi's guidance before the two of them sat down to write together. Kishimi is a philosopher and translator, one of the few Japanese scholars who reads Adler in German and has devoted his career to explaining why Adler -- the third great figure of the Viennese school, after Freud and Jung -- has been almost entirely forgotten in the West while the other two became household names. The book sold three million copies in Japan. It swept through Korea. By 2018, when it appeared in English, it had already changed how millions of people in East Asia thought about psychology, responsibility, and the strange courage required to live freely. A TikTok resurgence between 2022 and 2024 introduced it to an entirely new generation of readers who had grown up saturated in trauma discourse and found in Adler's ideas something genuinely unsettling: the possibility that none of it was inevitable.