I Can't Believe It's Not Buddhism - Kishimi and Koga's 'The Courage To Be Disliked'

Last Updated: 2025-04-28 00:00:00 -0500

I am not above judging books by their cover, and the snap impulse to snatch something up off a shelf and interrogate it deeply has brought me more joie de lire than just about any other way of discovering books; I occasionally get a good recommendation from a friend or fellow-reader, and more often than not fall down serial rabbit-holes (being an avid reader of genre fiction), but when I think of favourites from youth and beyond, I think of things like Ender’s Game, The Lord of the Rings, and Dragonlance, which you just see on a shelf and say “Hey, I’ll read that.” There are exceptions to the rule of course, but this was the rule that brought me to Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to be Disliked.

I came upon it last winter looking for books to give to everyone on my Christmas list and I thought “why not have a little treat”. A best-seller in the self-help space can only be seen as the “Beer and Pretzels” of reading, and since I was still stampeding along through Realizing Genjokoan I decided right then and there to grab it up, and I’m kind of glad I did.

Alfred Adler: Once Again, My Life is Complicated by a man from Austria

The central conceit of the book is a discussion between an older man (the “Philosopher”) and a younger man (“Youth”) around the catchy premise that everyone can be happy, immediately. This extraordinary claim is justified as being the principal take-away of the writings of a man named Alfred Adler - we can take the Philosopher as an expert in Alderian Psychiatry and possibly a composite surrogate for Kishimi (who is himself a practicing Adlerian councillor), and to some extent Koga, who is a multiple-bestselling author in this genre.

Adler was a early 20th Century medical doctor and psychiatrist - a contemprary of Freud (with whom he often disagreed) and most importantly the founder of an eponymous school of psychology which has come to be known since his death as “Individual Psychology” which is a… funny name for it, as we’ll get into. He’s a colourful character from a period of history that my contemporaries would often argue was a highly colourful time. He was, apparently, vaguely associated with Aleister Crowley, of all people, as one example. From a pop-psychology standpoint, his best known idea down to the present day is the concept of an inferiority complex, his ideas have a whole mess of interfacing with those of Freud (both contrarian and concordant) and roots in Nietzsche’s philsophies. Unsurprisingly for a 20th century psychiatrist he had a lot of dumb ideas (do not pursue his views on homosexuality if, like me, you get headaches when smart people say incredibly stupid things), but he also had some good core principles.

But, here’s something important: I had to go looking for anything objectionable to say about Adler. Kishimi certainly didn’t present any of Adler’s more objectionable takes and even if Adlerian Psychiatry isn’t quite the same thing as modern psychology as a discipline, I’d be willing to believe the man’s worse ideas were left behind; there’s certainly some good ideas here to pursue.

Ideas Without Borders

Something interesting is happening in this text. I admittedly started reading it during my review for Realizing Genjokoan, but even on subsequent readings months later, I can’t help but draw huge, exclamation-marks-in-the-marginalia, paralels between the ideas the text presents and classical buddhist concepts as I have come to understand them through my study of Soto Zen. I’m going to go into those in quite a lot of detail in a few paragraphs, but I almost can’t believe Adler never had exposure to a Zen theologian.

There’s a few ways to take this: Adler was himself exposed to Buddhist ideas at some point in his own lifetime, or Kishimi and Koga (almost certainly) were, but I prefer something slightly more interesting, at least to me. It’s my belief that the Adlerian views being presented sound Zennish because reality is reflected in the Middle Way.

Socratic Dialogues as a Framing Device

As I mentioned earlier, the book uses a sort of a Socratic Dialogue framing device where you have two characters in conversation with another, one being the old wise master and the other being some challenging junior figure. Too often, including (in my opinion) when Socrates supposedly did it, this framing device is used to play Strawman Jousting Simulator for as long as the reader can tolerate, and this framing has lead to more “ain’t no zealot like a convert” conversations than I care to admit.

In this specific case though, it’s tastefully done. Both participants are receptive to what the other has to say, and the Youth doesn’t just roll over and accept exactly what he’s being told - he brings cogent counter-arguments and even returns with variations on those arguments on the various “nights” that make up the five-act structure of the book. There is actually a sense of logical progression from one topic to another and within reasonable limits, the Youth seems to more or less convert by the end of the book, while remaining slightly skeptical of some of the ideas.

Key Ideas

I want to discuss a selection of what I think were the most interesting ideas in the book, without representing it in full, and I want to this for a couple of reasons: the first being, if you want the Cliff Notes version of the book, I’m sure it’s already out there. The second reason is that I personally believe that you cannot get the fullness of a text without reading it in its full presentation, often repeatedly, and that’s extra-special true where the topic concerns things like what a good life looks like or how to occupy space in the world amicably. I could not write this book better than Koga and Kishimi did. At risk of spoiling the ending of this review, I think you should read it in full.

Instead, what I want to do with my key ideas section for this review is talk about a few areas where I noticed strong conceptual overlap with ideas I’m familiar with from Zen Buddhism, because I think that comparison is interesting, and connecting those dots are the parts of reading this that got me up and pacing around the office instead of languishing in my chair (which badly needs replacement).

The Courage to be Disliked vs. The Man of No Rank

So, unsurpisingly, the very catchy phrase “Courage to be Disliked” turns out to not just be an eye-grabbing title but an important concept in the philosophy the old man presents. It is essentially a glib restatement of this conclusion: all problems are interpersonal relationship problems, and therefore can be solved by the courage to be disliked. It’s not so clear written in English because, despite my protestations, German Longwords haven’t been backported into the language yet, but my reading of the phrase has treated Courage to be Disliked as one continuous noun.

That courage is not the willingness to be an asshole on purpose or to be seen as one without regard, but it ties directly into another important idea from the text, the “seperation of tasks”, which is a way of saying that the life-that-is-composed-of-interpersonal-relationships is itself composed of tasks (I won’t get into Life Tasks directly; I am still digesting them), and that only some of those tasks are yours. The Courage to be Disliked is nothing more or less than the courage to forgo recognition-as-manipulation in the form of praise or demerit in order to defend your boundaries as to which tasks are yours and which are someone else’s. An example that’s used often in the book (and I think is why we call it the Courage to be Disliked) is that if you have an overbearing boss who is constantly expressing their distaste for you even as you meet your actual work commitments, to try to get a little more out of you, it’s important for you, as an individual, to recognize that “liking you” (or not) is your boss’s task, and not your own. Defending that boundary doesn’t change that your boss is overbearing, but it does change how personally you take that, and how much you deviate from your desired path to change the outcome.

In fact, a very central idea, justified by the seperation of tasks and encouraged to support this and other ideas in the work, is a complete invalidation of vertical heirarchy. Adler, the Philosopher argues, essentially tells us that vertical relationships are inherently disordered. They fuel the superiority and inferiority concepts and make difficult the important task of the “Courage to Be Normal”. We are instead encouraged to treat all relationships as horizontal relationships. We can acknowledge that others are ahead or behind us on the path we are are walking, but there is nothing inherently morally or socially superior about being at mile marker 20 as opposed to mile marker 4. Quite a lot goes into this idea, including semi-practical advice on how to go about cultivating horizontal relationships, but this introduces something very zennish: the courage to be normal.

An important concept in Zen Practice is the idea of the Man of No Rank, who I once had a older practitioner describe to me as “the most normal person to ever live”. The one with the courage to be normal and the man of no rank both essentially excise any idea that they are themselves special in any remarkable way. It means to neither see onesself as especially pure or impure, or over or under one another. You are neither wretched nor magnificent - you are just some person from some place. Well done. This attitude is important as a defense against superiority and inferiority complexes, and liberates you from one of my personal favourite stressor pits to get stuck in - the “I am not X enough!” pit.

As for how to achieve this? Why, just give every moment of your day your undivided and present attention, and fundamentally rewire your thinking-habits. You know, practice every-minute-Zen!

Teleology, Etiology, and the Three Truths of Tendai Chigi

One of the earliest ideas in the book, and I think probably the one most likely to get one of my peers or cohorts to just put the book down and not finish it, is enshrined in the chapter Trauma does not exist. This is, obviously, at a time when classical psychiatry sees trauma disorders at sort of a contemporary high, a little bit of a jackass statement. Like most simple statements, though, it belies a deeper complexity. To quote directly the text:

In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. […] The self [is] determined not by our experiences themselves, but by the meaning we give them. He is not saying that the experience of a horrible calamity or abuse during childhood or other such incidents have no influence on forming a personality, […] but the important thing is that nothing is actually determined by those influences. […] Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.

This sparks a discussion between the arguants that lasts the remainder of the first act of the book, but this one single idea is the through-line that I can draw between actual Zen teaching, this book, the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and would be the “one core truth of reality” that I would insist most people understand. This right here is Tendai Chigi’s “Truth of Emptiness”!

Here’s where that gets interesting to me: I forget that all objects are subject to the Truth of Emptiness, and I forget that because when I am trying to explain that concept to people, I usually explain it with physical objects. That piece of junk pen you find on the sidewalk by the bus-stop and move to the waste bin, meaning nothing to you, is my missing $40 Lamy that meant that I couldn’t close the deal on some high-powered lunch, because nobody thought to bring a pen. Classic. The problem is, Physical Object is just a subset of the wider set of objects. Thoughts and memories are ALSO objects, just as empty of inherent meaning as physical objects are. To Chun Li in the 1994 Street Fighter live action adaptation, the day General Bison visited her village was the most important day of her life. To General Bison, it was tuesday.

Now, the obvious objection to this idea is that it sounds a hell of a lot like “think yourself mentally well”, which as a sufferer of chronic and likely to be life-long mental illness is usually right around where I start walking, but the thing is, in this instance specifically, I have to give it to Adler: he’s not completely wrong. No, you can’t just reject the reality of a memory or change your perception of it to something non-traumatizing. If you have PTSD, guess what, we’ve had a great century in advancements for the systematic and holistic treatment of PTSD. I’m not sure that this is really intended to be an argument aginnst the fundamental reality of trauma-caused disorders, thouogh. It appears in the middle of a long chapter of a book, the thesis and purpose for which is establishing, before getting into even heavier psychological lifting, the idea that humans have agency over, and therefore the capacity to change, their lifestyle.

I actually wish the word trauma hadn’t been used in this argument, because it’s actually right! If you can maintain, truly maintain, every-minute-zen, and you can exercise what I like to call “second-order monitoring” over all the thoughts and feelings that arise, and keep an eye on the Truth of Emptiness, you, too, immediately, can act in any way you like, free of the burden of blindly responding to external and internal stimuli. I’m not sure how realistic that is to expect a person to do, but it’s not logically wrong. By taking a few minutes to think what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and how you intend to go about it, you can exercise concious choice and break out of the ruts of habitual lifestyle. You can reframe “I don’t go out because I’m afraid I look furtive and people will think I’m up to something” into “I am going to go out and be cool and mysterious.” It’s true.

Gemeinschaftsgefhül is the fibre of Indra’s Net

There’s another phrase that appears a lot in the text that I am quite certain is a german longword that was translated at least once into English (and quite possibly twice, once to Japanese and then to English), and that phrase is “community feeling”. I’m so sure that that was the case that I actually looked into it and found that, indeed, outside the text of the book Adler himself used the term and called it Gemeinschaftsgefhül.

Once the Philosopher introduces the seperation of tasks, and the Courage to be Disliked, the Youth fixates thereafter on a pessimistic vision of human self-interest, which can be hard to dispute. I think anyone contemporary to either this book or this blog post would be familiar with the idea that humans with unrestrained self-interest can cause a great amount of harm.

As a counter to this concern, for the individual actively practicing the seperation of tasks, the Philosopher prescribes the following:

Eliminate the Superiorty/Inferority Complex through the Courage to Be Normal.
If normal, the Need for Recognition must be filled by some other means. That means is the “community feeling”.

By cultivating, from an internal locus of origination, rather than an external source of recognition, a sense that one has contributed to their community, one can satisfy the need for recognition without relying on others completing the task “recognize one’s contributions”. Other than a vague allusion, the text skips over the most interesting consequence of this: Adler believed in a “universal community” of everything.

Y’know. Indra’s Net.

Making Use of the Equipment

This book shares a flaw that I feel it has in common with something on the order of 80% or so of all self-help. Granted, self-help is a genre of limited real utility; a whole lot of the writing in that field is flawed from first principals, and to be honest, most people want to “live better” but probably haven’t quite solidified exactly what that looks like for them yet, so personally I’ve always looked at self-help like the appetizers section on a menu: get a light portion of something to see if you like it, and dig into that deeper later. But even the self-help that’s good shares one important flaw:

There is very litle directly actionable advice in the book.

This, to be fair, is not a unique failing of self-help books. It matches my lived experience of a whole lot of things, from zazen practice to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to the Liturgy of the Hours (it’s a really long story) to learning skills that require indefinite, open-ended practice (language, music, visual arts, physical exercise). In short, the book wants me to do the thing I’m the worst at: materially change my lifestyle with a minimum of active advice.

In this case though, there’s a pretty good reason for that: practices aren’t talismans. It’s why people have exercise machines that serve for coat racks, why just collecting the CBT paperwork from your therapist every month and filling it out half-assed on the bus to your next appointment doesn’t really help anyone, and why nobody gives credit for the books in your “to be read” pile.

You have to actually do the practice. You have to actually maintain conscious awareness of your thought processes until an etiology-over-teleology model of understanding causality is automatic for you. You have to recognize anger arising as natural without induling in the expression of anger just to scratch its itch. You have to run your mileage, you have to take your pills, you have to read your books.

Now, that said, it is possible to read this entire book (and you should) and come away with something approaching the shape of a lifestyle change. The philosopher proposes that we can do two important things: cultivate social interest, and be happy.

Of course, by the end of that process I found myself having scribbled into my commonplace “In other words, practice every-minute-zen and become the man of no rank, easy”, which I feel now I must have said with some real sense of sarcasm.

By fixating on (or at least replacing several other positives with) the “community feeling”, we can move from a place of pure self interest to a place of social interest by cultivating three virtues:

Self Acceptance (which is not just blind self-affirmation): accept one’s incapable self as the present reality (without passing judgement onto the term incapable, here) and use that to work toward our own definition of a more ideal self.
Confidence in others (without devolving to blind trust): do not set conditions upon our trust and recognize that not taking advantage of ourselves is actually the task of other people. Within reason, of course, but in general the idea is to move toward a view of our peers and fellows-in-society as comrades rather than rivals. In my notes I wrote that a better phrasing of this rule was “Don’t treat relationships as adversarial”
Contribution to others (which is not self-sacrifice): perform actins that give us a sense of having contributed to our relationships, both in the local (household) sense and the broader (colloquial “community”) sense. Again, the focus is on one performing actions which self-satisfy as being of use to the community; that is, not seeking external recognition for having “done good”, but “doing good” in ways that we feel we provide value. Again, in my notes I dumbed this down to “derive self-satisfaction from the sense that your work is meaningful at the local scale”.

All Humans Can Be Happy

And here again, the philospher creates a three-point plan:

Redirect the desire for external recognition into the desire to gain a feeling of contribution (thus freeing yourself of the need for external recognition)
Reject the need to be a special figure (thus relieving the pressure on yourself to become “perfect” at any point and instead allow you to focus on natural and sustainable self-improvement)
Live a life of moments where the process is the intended outcome. The philosopher uses the example of dancing, but this is literally just the concept of every-minute-zen and the idea that your attention at all times should be the completely on what you’re doing now.

Conclusion

This book is a great example of “you can get a lot from even light reading if you dig into it”. I do think that much like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it pushes in the general direction of Zen without really meaning to or, if does mean to, caring much about doctrinal correctness - which admittedly would be a very Zen thing to do. I don’t know anything except what’s in the blurb about either of the authors though, and I don’t know anything more than what’s in the text about what they were trying to write. This puts be in a slightly weird spot.

I want to endorse this book’s philosophy unconditionaly. I believe in the Three Truths like I believe in the sunrise. They aren’t really a matter of religious doctrine and it’s neat to see them all show up in a completely unrelated work that’s ostensibly psychological in nature. I find the tone of the book genuinely hopeful and I believe in its arguments for the ideas that anyone can change their lifestyle from whatever state to whatever other state (as bounded by their material reality, of course), and I agree that, if so motivated, you can mentally adapt to - and become happy in - just about any condition.

But I also feel the need to qualify that, in part because of the general disdain I have for self-help as an industry (while recognizing that there’s good books to be found in the category), the open-ended approach to the conclusion which sort of leaves you full of motivation but without much actionable plan other than “I am going to hyperfixate on how I think until I don’t have to do that anymore”, and the fact that Adler is a psychiatrist from the turn of the 20th century who was a contemporary of Freud and all that that century’s history with psychiatry could imply.

The good news is, Adler isn’t actually involved here and doesn’t make any money off the book. I say you should read it. Seriously. It is actually a good book and a light read. I finished the initial skim in an afternoon and don’t think that my analysis reading took much longer than another eight hours total atop of that first read. And, who knows? I could very well have missed something in there that will change your life completely when you read it. Turth of Emptiness and all.