The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

The Courage To Be Disliked is the dialogue between a philosopher and a youth which was first published in 2013.
The youth is unsatisfied with his life and claims several reasons why it is impossible for him to move forward. He heard about this philosopher who claims that the world is simple and everyone can be happy instantly. The youth can’t accept this stanza and confronts the philosopher. This results in a dialogue that takes place in 5 nights stretched out over several weeks, giving the youth time to learn about the things he learned in the previous night.

The philosopher teaches the Ancient Greek Philosophy and in his studies he adopted the psychology of Alfred Adler, an austrian psychologist who lived from 1870 – 1937. Adler is a little less famous than Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he invented what he called Individual Psychology.

The Courage To Be Disliked teaches this kind of psychology in a beautiful written dialogue. During this dialogue the youth tries to contradict the arguments of Adlerian psychology but remains unsuccessful. The book picks up several topics that have been discussed in philosophy and psychology at length. In the first night they talk about Trauma, the second is about interpersonal relationships, the third about discarding other peoples tasks, the fourth about the centre of the world and the final night is about living in the here and now.

My personal opinion is, that this book is beautiful written. I actually read it other the course of five days (but not one night per day, to be fair). For me it was like sitting in a philosophers office and listen to the discussion without them knowing I am here too. I couldn’t read too much at a time, because the book does make you think a lot and I took the time to get away from it and came back later to continue.

I recommend this book to everyone who is dissatisfied with his current life, everyone who tries too hard to make other people happy and everyone who has problems in interpersonal relationships.

3 key take-aways I had while reading:

* Focus on what you can control rather than what other people think of it
* You can contribute to society in much more ways than you might think
* Live in the moment, the past is gone and the future cannot be predicted

You can find it here on Amazon