The Courage To Be Disliked

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Well, if we were still living at a time when religion held sway, salvation might be an option because the teachings of the divine were everything to us. All we had to do was obey them and consequently have little to think about. But religion has lost its power and now there is no real belief in God. With nothing to rely on, everyone is filled with anxiety and doubt. Everyone is living for themselves.
• There is no escape from your own subjectivity.
• Why was he so determined to reject the philosopher’s theories? His reasons were abundantly clear. He lacked self-confidence and, ever since childhood, this had been compounded by deep-seated feelings of inferiority with regard to his personal and academic backgrounds, as well as his physical appearance. Perhaps, as a result, he tended to be excessively self-conscious when people looked at him. Mostly, he seemed incapable of truly appreciating other people’s happiness and was constantly pitying himself.
• For example, Dale Carnegie, who wrote the international bestsellers How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, referred to Adler as “a great psychologist who devoted his life to researching humans and their latent abilities.”
• The influence of Adler’s thinking is clearly present throughout his writings. And in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, much of the content closely resembles Adler’s ideas. In other words, rather than being a strict area of scholarship, Adlerian psychology is accepted as a realization, a culmination of truths and of human understanding.
• 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.
• 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.”
• This is the difference between etiology (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 etiology. As long as we stay in etiology, we will not take a single step forward.
• In Adlerian psychology, trauma is definitively denied. This was a very new and revolutionary point. 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.
• Every one of us is living in line with some goal. That is what teleology tells us.
• In a word, anger is a tool that can be taken out as needed. It can be put away the moment the phone rings, and pulled out again after one hangs up. 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.
• Adlerian psychology is a form of thought, a philosophy that is diametrically opposed to nihilism. We are not controlled by emotion. In this sense, while it shows that people are not controlled by emotion, additionally it shows that we are not controlled by the past.
• Life isn’t just hard. If the past determined everything and couldn’t be changed, we who are living today would no longer be able to take effective steps forward in our lives.
• “People are not driven by past causes but move toward goals that they themselves set”—that
• Right now, you are unable to feel really happy. This is because you have not learned to love yourself. And to try to love yourself, you are wishing to be reborn as a different person. You’re hoping to become like Y and throw away who you are now.
• To quote Adler again: “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.
• Does fixating on what you are born with change the reality? We are not replaceable machines. It is not replacement we need but renewal.
• 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.”
• At some stage in your life, you chose “being unhappy.” It is not because you were born into unhappy circumstances or ended up in an unhappy situation. It’s that you judged “being unhappy” to be good for you.
• Earlier you said that any person’s disposition or personality cannot be changed. In Adlerian psychology, we describe personality and disposition with the word “lifestyle.”
• Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life.
• How one sees the world. And how one sees oneself. Think of lifestyle as a concept bringing together these ways of finding meaning. In a narrow sense, lifestyle could be defined as someone’s personality; taken more broadly, it is a word that encompasses the worldview of that person and his or her outlook on life.
• Yes, you can. People can change at any time, regardless of the environments they are in. You are unable to change only because you are making the decision not to.
• Although there are some small inconveniences and limitations, you probably think that the lifestyle you have now is the most practical one, and that it’s easier to leave things as they are. If you stay just like this, experience enables you to respond properly to events as they occur, while guessing the results of one’s actions. You could say it’s like driving your old, familiar car. It might rattle a bit, but one can take that into account and maneuver easily. On the other hand, if one chooses a new lifestyle, no one can predict what might happen to the new self, or have any idea how to deal with events as they arise. It will be hard to see ahead to the future, and life will be filled with anxiety. A more painful and unhappy life might lie ahead. Simply put, people have various complaints about things, but it’s easier and more secure to be just the way one is.
• Yes. Adlerian psychology is a psychology of courage. Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.
• No, you are not being criticized. Rather, as Adler’s teleology tells us, “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.
• I admitted that I dislike myself. No matter what I do, I can’t find anything but shortcomings, and I can see no reason why I’d start liking myself. But of course I still want to. You explain everything as having to do with goals, but what kind of goal could I have here? I mean, what kind of advantage could there be in my not liking myself? I can’t imagine there’d be a single thing to gain from it.
• Students preparing for their exams think, If I pass, life will be rosy. Company workers think, If I get transferred, everything will go well. But even when those wishes are fulfilled, in many cases nothing about their situations changes at all.
• What I can do is to get the person first to accept “myself now,” and then regardless of the outcome have the courage to step forward. In Adlerian psychology, this kind of approach is called “encouragement.”
• Why do you dislike yourself? Why do you focus only on your shortcomings, and why have you decided to not start liking yourself? It’s because you are overly afraid of being disliked by other people and getting hurt in your interpersonal relationships.
• You’re afraid of being treated disparagingly, being refused, and sustaining deep mental wounds. You think that instead of getting entangled in such situations, it would be better if you just didn’t have relations with anyone in the first place. In other words, your goal is to not get hurt in your relationships with other people.
• Admitting is a good attitude. 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. Adler says, “To get rid of one’s problems, all one can do is live in the universe all alone.” But one can’t do such a thing.
• As long as there is someone out there somewhere, you will be haunted by loneliness.
• There is no such thing as worry that is completely defined by the individual; so-called internal worry does not exist. Whatever the worry that may arise, the shadows of other people are always present.
• In Adler’s native German, the word is Minderwertigkeitsgefühl, which means a feeling (Gefühl) of having less (minder) worth (Wert). So “feeling of inferiority” has to do with one’s value judgment of oneself.
• My feelings about my height were all subjective feelings of inferiority, which arose entirely through my comparing myself to others. That is to say, in my interpersonal relationships. Because if there hadn’t been anyone with whom to compare myself, I wouldn’t have had any occasion to think I was short. Right now, you too are suffering from various feelings of inferiority. But please understand that what you are feeling is not an objective inferiority but a subjective feeling of inferiority. Even with an issue like height, it’s all reduced to its subjectivity.
• We cannot alter objective facts. But subjective interpretations can be altered as much as one likes. And we are inhabitants of a subjective world.
• The counterpart of this is the feeling of inferiority. Everyone is in this “condition of wanting to improve” that is the pursuit of superiority. One holds up various ideals or goals and heads toward them. However, on not being able to reach one’s ideals, one harbors a sense of being lesser.
• Adler is saying that the pursuit of superiority and the feeling of inferiority are not diseases but stimulants to normal, healthy striving and growth. If it is not used in the wrong way, the feeling of inferiority, too, can promote striving and growth.
  • Amy Chua book about simultaneously feeling chosen (having our sense of superiority lifted) while also being rejected and having a chip on our shoulder (inflames our sense of inferiority)
• One tries to get rid of one’s feeling of inferiority and keep moving forward. One’s never satisfied with one’s present situation—even if it’s just a single step, one wants to make progress. One wants to be happier. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the state of this kind of feeling of inferiority. There are, however, people who lose the courage to take a single step forward, who cannot accept the fact that the situation can be changed by making realistic efforts. People who, before even doing anything, simply give up and say things like “I’m not good enough anyway” or “Even if I tried, I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
• There is nothing particularly wrong with the feeling of inferiority itself. You understand this point now, right? As Adler says, the feeling of inferiority can be a trigger for striving and growth. For instance, if one had a feeling of inferiority with regard to one’s education, and resolved to oneself, I’m not well educated, so I’ll just have to try harder than anyone else, that would be a desirable direction. The inferiority complex, on the other hand, refers to a condition of having begun to use one’s feeling of inferiority as a kind of excuse. So one thinks to oneself, I’m not well educated, so I can’t succeed, or I’m not good-looking, so I can’t get married. 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.
• As Adler points out, no one is capable of putting up with having feelings of inferiority for a long period of time. Feelings of inferiority are something that everyone has, but staying in that condition is too heavy to endure forever.
• When we refer to the pursuit of superiority, there’s a tendency to think of it as the desire to try to be superior to other people; to climb higher, even if it means kicking others down—you know, the image of ascending a stairway and pushing people out of the way to get to the top. Adler does not uphold such attitudes, of course. Rather, he’s saying that on the same level playing field, there are people who are moving forward, and there are people who are moving forward behind them. Keep that image in mind. Though the distance covered and the speed of walking differ, everyone is walking equally in the same flat place. The pursuit of superiority is the mind-set of taking a single step forward on one’s own feet, not the mind-set of competition of the sort that necessitates aiming to be greater than other people.
• A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.
• Everyone is different. Don’t mix up that difference with good and bad, and superior and inferior. Whatever differences we may have, we are all equal.
• Instead of treating the child like an adult, or like a child, one must treat him or her like a human being. One interacts with the child with sincerity, as another human being just like oneself.
• It does not matter if one is trying to walk in front of others or walk behind them. It is as if we are moving through a flat space that has no vertical axis. We do not walk in order to compete with someone. It is in trying to progress past who one is now that there is value.
• I withdrew from places that are preoccupied with winning and losing. When one is trying to be oneself, competition will inevitably get in the way.
• Give some thought to it, then, if it were you, specifically, who had a consciousness of being in competition with the people around you. In your relations with them, you would have no choice but to be conscious of victory or defeat. Mr. A got into this famous university, Mr. B found work at that big company, and Mr. C has hooked up with such a nice-looking woman—and you’ll compare yourself to them and think, This is all I’ve got.
• When one is conscious of competition and victory and defeat, it is inevitable that feelings of inferiority will arise. Because one is constantly comparing oneself to others and thinking, I beat that person or I lost to that person. The inferiority complex and the superiority complex are extensions of that.
• Before you know it, you start to see each and every person, everyone in the whole world, as your enemy.
• This is what is so terrifying about competition. 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 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.
• You think of interpersonal relationships as competition; you perceive other people’s happiness as “my defeat,” and that is why you can’t celebrate it. However, once one is released from the schema of competition, the need to triumph over someone disappears. One is also released from the fear that says, Maybe I will lose. And one becomes able to celebrate other people’s happiness with all one’s heart. One may become able to contribute actively to other people’s happiness. The person who always has the will to help another in times of need—that is someone who may properly be called your comrade.
• If someone were to abuse me to my face, I would think about the person’s hidden goal. Even if you are not directly abusive, when you feel genuinely angry due to another person’s words or behavior, please consider that the person is challenging you to a power struggle.
• And once the interpersonal relationship reaches the revenge stage, it is almost impossible for either party to find a solution. To prevent this from happening, when one is challenged to a power struggle, one must never allow oneself to be taken in.
• When you control your anger, you’re “bearing it,” right? Instead, let’s learn a way to settle things without using the emotion of anger. Because after all, anger is a tool. A means for achieving a goal.
• It’s not that you mustn’t get angry, but that there is no need to rely on the tool of anger. 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.
• We have language. We can communicate through language. Believe in the power of language and the language of logic.
• The moment one is convinced that “I am right” in an interpersonal relationship, one has already stepped into a power struggle.
• But it isn’t that you dislike Mr. A because you can’t forgive his flaws. You had the goal of taking a dislike to Mr. A beforehand and then started looking for the flaws to satisfy that goal.
• Adler called the state of coming up with all manner of pretexts in order to avoid the life tasks the “life-lie.”
• If your lifestyle were determined by other people or your environment, it would certainly be possible to shift responsibility. But we choose our lifestyles ourselves. It’s clear where the responsibility lies.
• This is the danger of the desire for recognition. Why is it that people seek recognition from others? In many cases, it is due to the influence of reward-and-punishment education.
• If one takes appropriate action, one receives praise. If one takes inappropriate action, one receives punishment. Adler was very critical of education by reward and punishment. It leads to mistaken lifestyles in which people think, If no one is going to praise me, I won’t take appropriate action and If no one is going to punish me, I’ll engage in inappropriate actions, too. You already have the goal of wanting to be praised when you start picking up litter. And if you aren’t praised by anyone, you’ll either be indignant or decide that you’ll never do such a thing again. Clearly, there’s something wrong with this situation.
  • Learning to be righteous in the dark.
• You are not living to satisfy other people’s expectations, and neither am I. It is not necessary to satisfy other people’s expectations.
• Wishing so hard to be recognized will lead to a life of following expectations held by other people who want you to be “this kind of person.” In other words, you throw away who you really are and live other people’s lives.
• In general, all interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own tasks intruded on. Carrying out the separation of tasks is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.
• There is a simple way to tell whose task it is. Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?
• At this point, the most important thing is whether the child feels he can consult frankly with his parents when he is experiencing a dilemma, and whether they have been building enough of a trust relationship on a regular basis.
• In their choices of university, place of employment, and partner in marriage, and even in the everyday subtleties of speech and conduct, they do not act according to their parents’ wishes. Naturally, the parents will worry about them, and probably want to intervene at times. But, as I said earlier, other people are not living to satisfy your expectations. Though the child is one’s own, he or she is not living to satisfy one’s expectations as a parent.
• All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgment do other people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.
• You are worried about other people looking at you. You are worried about being judged by other people. That is why you are constantly craving recognition from others. Now, why are you worried about other people looking at you, anyway? Adlerian psychology has an easy answer. You haven’t done the separation of tasks yet. You assume that even things that should be other people’s tasks are your own. Remember the words of the grandmother: “You’re the only one who’s worried how you look.” Her remark drives right to the heart of the separation of tasks. What other people think when they see your face—that is the task of other people and is not something you have any control over.
• You think, I’ve got that boss, so I can’t work. This is complete etiology. But it’s really, I don’t want to work, so I’ll create an awful boss, or I don’t want to acknowledge my incapable self, so I’ll create an awful boss. That would be the teleological way of looking at it.
• This is the famous anecdote known as the Gordian knot. And so, such intricate knots—the bonds in our interpersonal relationships—are not to be unraveled by conventional methods but must be severed by some completely new approach. Whenever I explain the separation of tasks, I always remember the Gordian knot.
• For instance, when reading a book, if one brings one’s face too close to it, one cannot see anything. In the same way, forming good interpersonal relationships requires a certain degree of distance. When the distance gets too small and people become stuck together, it becomes impossible to even speak to each other. But the distance must not be too great, either. Parents who scold their children too much become mentally very distant. When this happens, the child can no longer even consult the parents, and the parents can no longer give the proper assistance. One should be ready to lend a hand when needed but not encroach on the person’s territory. It is important to maintain this kind of moderate distance.
• When reward is at the base of an interpersonal relationship, there’s a feeling that wells up in one that says, “I gave this much, so you should give me that much back.” This is a notion that is quite different from separation of tasks, of course. We must not seek reward, and we must not be tied to it.
• For the busy mother, it is certainly faster to tie them than to wait for him to do it himself. But that is an intervention, and it is taking the child’s task away from him. And as a result of repeating that intervention, the child will cease to learn anything, and will lose the courage to face his life tasks. As Adler says, “Children who have not been taught to confront challenges will try to avoid all challenges.”
• Maybe it is easier to live in such a way as to satisfy other people’s expectations. Because one is entrusting one’s own life to them. For example, one runs along the tracks that one’s parents have laid out. Even if there are a lot of things one might object to, one will not lose one’s way as long as one stays on those rails. But if one is deciding one’s path oneself, it’s only natural that one will get lost at times. One comes up against the wall of “how one should live.”
• You were talking about God earlier, and if we were still living in an era when God was something people believed in, I suppose that “God is watching” might serve as a criterion for self-discipline. If one were recognized by God, maybe one didn’t need recognition from others. But that era ended a long time ago. And, in that case, one has no choice but to discipline oneself on the basis that other people are watching. To aspire to be recognized by others and live an honest life. Other people’s eyes are my guide. PHILOSOPHER: Does one choose recognition from others, or does one choose a path of freedom without recognition? It’s an important question—let’s think about it together. To live one’s life trying to gauge other people’s feelings and being worried about how they look at you. To live in such a way that others’ wishes are granted. There may indeed be signposts to guide you this way, but it is a very unfree way to live.
• What should one do to not be disliked by anyone? There is only one answer: It is to constantly gauge other people’s feelings while swearing loyalty to all of them. If there are ten people, one must swear loyalty to all ten. When one does that, for the time being one will have succeeded in not being disliked by anyone. But at this point, there is a great contradiction looming. One swears loyalty to all ten people out of the single-minded desire to not be disliked.
• Separating one’s tasks is not an egocentric thing. Intervening in other people’s tasks is essentially an egocentric way of thinking, however. Parents force their children to study; they meddle in their life and marriage choices. That is nothing other than an egocentric way of thinking.
• In short, that “freedom is being disliked by other people.”
• One neither prepares to be self-righteous nor becomes defiant. One just separates tasks. There may be a person who does not think well of you, but that is not your task. And again, thinking things like He should like me or I’ve done all this, so it’s strange that he doesn’t like me, is the reward-oriented way of thinking of having intervened in another person’s tasks. One moves forward without fearing the possibility of being disliked. One does not live as if one were rolling downhill, but instead climbs the slope that lies ahead. That is freedom for a human being. Suppose that I had two choices in front of me—a life in which all people like me, and a life in which there are people who dislike me—and I was told to choose one. I would choose the latter without a second thought. Before being concerned with what others think of me, I want to follow through with my own being. That is to say, I want to live in freedom.
• 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.
• Many people think that the interpersonal relationship cards are held by the other person. That is why they wonder, How does that person feel about me? and end up living in such a way as to satisfy the wishes of other people. But if they can grasp the separation of tasks, they will notice that they are holding all the cards. This is a new way of thinking.
• When we speak of interpersonal relationships, it always seems to be two-person relationships and one’s relationship to a large group that come to mind, but first it is oneself. When one is tied to the desire for recognition, the interpersonal relationship cards will always stay in the hands of other people. Does one entrust the cards of life to another person, or hold onto them oneself?
• If other people are our comrades, and we live surrounded by them, we should be able to find in that life our own place of “refuge.” Moreover, in doing so, we should begin to have the desire to share with our comrades, to contribute to the community. This sense of others as comrades, this awareness of “having one’s own refuge,” is called “community feeling.”
• Adlerian psychology has the view that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Interpersonal relations are the source of unhappiness. And the opposite can be said, too—interpersonal relations are the source of happiness.
• Consider the reality of the desire for recognition. How much do others pay attention to you, and what is their judgment of you? That is to say, how much do they satisfy your desire? People who are obsessed with such a desire for recognition will seem to be looking at other people, while they are actually looking only at themselves. They lack concern for others and are concerned solely with the “I.” Simply put, they are self-centered.
• In the sense that you are concerned solely with the “I,” you are self-centered. You want to be thought well of by others, and that is why you worry about the way they look at you. That is not concern for others. It is nothing but attachment to self.
• People who have concern only for themselves think that they are at the center of the world. To such people, others are merely “people who will do something for me.” They half genuinely believe that everyone else exists to serve them and should give precedence to their feelings.
• All of us are searching for the sense of belonging, that “it’s okay to be here.” In Adlerian psychology, however, a sense of belonging is something that one can attain only by making an active commitment to the community of one’s own accord, and not simply by being here.
• One needs to think not, What will this person give me? but rather, What can I give to this person? That is commitment to the community.
• A community that you can break relations with by simply submitting a withdrawal notice is one that you can have only so much connection to, in any case.
• When we run into difficulties in our interpersonal relations, or when we can no longer see a way out, what we should consider first and foremost is the principle that says, “Listen to the voice of the larger community.”
• In other words, the mother who praises the child by saying things like “You’re such a good helper!” or “Good job!” or “Well, aren’t you something!” is unconsciously creating a hierarchical relationship and seeing the child as beneath her. The example of animal training that you just gave is also emblematic of the hierarchical relationship—the vertical relationship—that is behind the praising. 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.
• Maybe I do have an awareness of manipulation somewhere in my psyche when I go about praising other people. Laying on the flattery to get in good favor with my boss—that’s definitely manipulation, isn’t it? And it’s the other way around, too. I’ve been manipulated by being praised by others. Funny, I guess that’s just the sort of person I am!
• The more one is praised by another person, the more one forms the belief that one has no ability.
• When receiving praise becomes one’s goal, one is choosing a way of living that is in line with another person’s system of values.
• The most important thing is to not judge other people. “Judgment” is a word that comes out of vertical relationships. If one is building horizontal relationships, there will be words of more straightforward gratitude and respect and joy.
• “It is only when a person is able to feel that he has worth that he can possess courage.”
• It is about having concern for others, building horizontal relationships, and taking the approach of encouragement. All these things connect to the deep life awareness of “I am of use to someone,” and in turn, to your courage to live.
• Imagine, for example, a child who never talks back to his parents, excels in both schoolwork and sports, attends a good university, and joins a large company. There are parents who will compare their child to such an image of an ideal child—which is an impossible fiction—and then be filled with complaints and dissatisfaction. They treat the idealized image as one hundred points, and they gradually subtract from that. This is truly a “judgment” way of thinking. Instead, the parents could refrain from comparing their child to anyone else, see him for who he actually is, and be glad and grateful for his being there. Instead of taking away points from some idealized image, they could start from zero. And if they do that, they should be able to call out to his existence itself.
• “Someone has to start. Other people might not be cooperative, but that is not connected to you. My advice is this: you should start. With no regard to whether others are cooperative or not.”
• If you are building even one vertical relationship with someone, before you even notice what is happening, you will be treating all your interpersonal relations as vertical.
• If I were a narcissist, for example—if I were in love with myself and constantly fascinated with myself—maybe that would simplify things. Because your instruction, “Have more concern for others,” is a perfectly sound one. But I am not a self-loving narcissist. I am a self-loathing realist. I hate who I am, and that’s exactly why I look at myself all the time. I don’t have confidence in myself, and that’s why I am excessively self-conscious.
• Anyone can behave like a king when they’re alone.
• It’s about community feeling, after all. Concretely speaking, it’s making the switch from attachment to self (self-interest) to concern for others (social interest) and gaining a sense of community feeling. Three things are needed at this point: “self-acceptance,” “confidence in others,” and “contribution to others.”
• Resignation has the connotation of seeing clearly with fortitude and acceptance. Having a firm grasp on the truth of things—that is resignation. There is nothing pessimistic about it.
• It is precisely because one can gain the courage to enter into deeper relationships by having confidence in others that the joy of one’s interpersonal relations can grow, and one’s joy in life can grow, too.
• PHILOSOPHER: First, one accepts one’s irreplaceable “this me” just as it is. That is self-acceptance. Then, one places unconditional confidence in other people. That is confidence in others. You can accept yourself, and you can have confidence in others. So what are other people to you now? YOUTH: My comrades? PHILOSOPHER: Exactly. In effect, placing confidence in others is connected to seeing others as comrades. It is because they are one’s comrades that one can have confidence in them. If they were not one’s comrades, one would not be able to reach the level of confidence. And then, having other people as one’s comrades connects to finding refuge in the community one belongs to. So one can gain the sense of belonging, that “it’s okay to be here.”
• To take it a step farther, one may say that people who think of others as enemies have not attained self-acceptance and do not have enough confidence in others.
• In fact, if I am grumbling to myself as I wash the dishes, I am probably not much fun to be around, so everyone just wants to keep their distance. On the other hand, if I’m humming away to myself and washing the dishes in good spirits, the children might come and give me a hand. At the very least, I’d be creating an atmosphere in which it is easier for them to offer their help.
• It is because one accepts oneself just as one is—one self-accepts—that one can have “confidence in others” without the fear of being taken advantage of. And it is because one can place unconditional confidence in others, and feel that people are one’s comrades, that one can engage in “contribution to others.” Further, it is because one contributes to others that one can have the deep awareness that “I am of use to someone” and accept oneself just as one is. One can self-accept.
• As Adler himself said, “Understanding a human being is no easy matter. Of all the forms of psychology, individual psychology is probably the most difficult to learn and put into practice.”
• In the teachings of Judaism, one finds the following anecdote: “If there are ten people, one will be someone who criticizes you no matter what you do. This person will come to dislike you, and you will not learn to like him either. Then, there will be two others who accept everything about you and whom you accept too, and you will become close friends with them. The remaining seven people will be neither of these types.” Now, do you focus on the one person who dislikes you? Do you pay more attention to the two who love you? Or would you focus on the crowd, the other seven? A person who is lacking in harmony of life will see only the one person he dislikes and will make a judgment of the world from that.
• PHILOSOPHER: Well, another would be the workaholic. This, too, is an example of a person who is clearly lacking in harmony of life. YOUTH: A workaholic is? Why is that? PHILOSOPHER: People who suffer from stammering are looking at only a part of things but judging the whole. With workaholics, the focus is solely on one specific aspect of life. They probably try to justify that by saying, “It’s busy at work, so I don’t have enough time to think about my family.” But this is a life-lie. They are simply trying to avoid their other responsibilities by using work as an excuse. One ought to concern oneself with everything, from household chores and child-rearing to one’s friendships and hobbies and so on. Adler does not recognize ways of living in which certain aspects are unusually dominant. YOUTH: Ah… That’s exactly the sort of person my father was. It was just: Be a workaholic, bury yourself in your work, and produce results. And then rule over the family on the grounds that you are the breadwinner. He was a very feudalistic person. PHILOSOPHER: In a sense, that is a way of living of refusing to acknowledge one’s life tasks. “Work” does not mean having a job at a company. Work in the home, child-rearing, contributing to the local society, hobbies, and all manner of other things are work. Companies and such are just one small part of that. A way of living that acknowledges only company work is one that is lacking in harmony of life. YOUTH: It’s exactly as you say! And it’s not as if the family he’s supporting has any say in the matter, either. You can’t argue with your father when he growls with a violent tone of voice, “It’s thanks to me that there’s food on the table.” PHILOSOPHER: Such a father has probably been able to recognize his own worth only on the level of acts. He works all those hours, brings in enough money to support a family, and is recognized by society—and, on that basis, he views himself as having greater worth than the other members of his family. For each and every one of us, however, there comes a time when one can no longer serve as the provider. When one gets older and reaches retirement age, for example, one may have no choice but to live off one’s pension or support from one’s children. Even when one is young, injury or poor health can lead to being unable work any longer. On such occasions, those who can accept themselves only on the level of acts are severely damaged.
• PHILOSOPHER: Does one accept oneself on the level of acts, or on the level of being? This is truly a question that relates to the courage to be happy.
• For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself. Adler came up with an extremely simple answer to address this reality. Namely, that the feeling of “I am beneficial to the community” or “I am of use to someone” is the only thing that can give one a true awareness that one has worth.
• You are not the one who decides if your contributions are of use. That is the task of other people, and is not an issue in which you can intervene. In principle, there is not even any way you can know whether you have really made a contribution. That is to say, when we are engaging in this contribution to others, the contribution does not have to be a visible one—all we need is the subjective sense that “I am of use to someone,” or in other words, a feeling of contribution.
• All human beings can be happy. But it must be understood that this does not mean all human beings are happy. Whether it is on the level of acts or on the level of being, one needs to feel that one is of use to someone. That is to say, one needs a feeling of contribution.
• People want to like themselves. They want to feel that they have worth. In order to feel that, they want a feeling of contribution that tells them “I am of use to someone.” And they seek recognition from others as an easy means for gaining that feeling of contribution.
• If one’s means for gaining a feeling of contribution turns out to be “being recognized by others,” in the long run, one will have no choice but to walk through life in accordance with other people’s wishes. There is no freedom in a feeling of contribution that is gained through the desire for recognition.
• People can be truly aware of their worth only when they are able to feel “I am of use to someone.” However, it doesn’t matter if the contribution one makes at such a time is without any visible form. It is enough to have the subjective sense of being of use to someone, that is to say, a feeling of contribution. And then the philosopher arrives at the following conclusion: Happiness is the feeling of contribution.
  • It’s like putting away your shopping cart. You feel good because you’re contributing even if no one sees you.
• Being rebuked, more than anything else, puts stress on the child. But even if it is in the form of rebuke, the child wants his parents’ attention. He wants to be a special being, and the form that attention takes doesn’t matter. So in a sense, it is only natural that he does not stop engaging in problem behavior, no matter how harshly he is rebuked.
• YOUTH: But how…? It would be impossible for all human beings to be especially good, or anything like that, wouldn’t it? No matter what, people have their strengths and weaknesses, and there will always be differences. There’s only a handful of geniuses in the world, and not everyone is cut out to be an honors student. So for all the losers, there’s nothing for it besides being especially bad. PHILOSOPHER: Yes, it’s that Socratic paradox, that no one desires evil. Because to children who engage in problem behavior, even violent acts and theft are accomplishments of “good.” YOUTH: But that’s horrible! That’s a line of reasoning with no way out. PHILOSOPHER: What Adlerian psychology emphasizes at this juncture are the words “the courage to be normal.” YOUTH: The courage to be normal? PHILOSOPHER: Why is it necessary to be special? Probably because one cannot accept one’s normal self. And it is precisely for this reason that when being especially good becomes a lost cause, one makes the huge leap to being especially bad—the opposite extreme. But is being normal, being ordinary, really such a bad thing? Is it something inferior? Or, in truth, isn’t everybody normal? It is necessary to think this through to its logical conclusion. YOUTH: So are you saying that I should be normal? PHILOSOPHER: Self-acceptance is the vital first step. If you are able to possess the courage to be normal, your way of looking at the world will change dramatically. YOUTH: But… PHILOSOPHER: You are probably rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority. YOUTH: Fine, I acknowledge the danger of aiming to be special. But does one really need to make the deliberate choice to be normal? If I pass my time in this world in an utterly humdrum way, if I lead a pointless life without leaving any record or memory of my existence whatsoever, am I to just be satisfied with my lot, because that’s the sort of human being I am? You’ve got to be joking. I’d abandon such a life in a second! PHILOSOPHER: You want to be special, no matter what? YOUTH: No! Look, accepting what you call “normal” would lead to me having to affirm my idle self! It would just be saying, “This is all I am capable of and that’s fine.” I refuse to accept such an idle way of life. Do you think that Napoleon or Alexander the Great or Einstein or Martin Luther King accepted “normal”? And how about Socrates and Plato? Not a chance! More than likely, they all lived their lives while carrying the torch of a great ideal or objective. Another Napoleon could never emerge with your line of reasoning. You are trying to rid the world of geniuses! PHILOSOPHER: So what you are saying is that one needs lofty goals in life. YOUTH: But that’s obvious!
• What kind of goal is the act of going on a journey? Suppose you are going on a journey to Egypt. Would you try to arrive at the Great Pyramid of Giza as efficiently and quickly as possible, and then head straight back home by the shortest route? One would not call that a “journey.” You should be on a journey the moment you step outside your home, and all the moments on the way to your destination should be a journey. Of course, there might be circumstances that prevent you from making it to the pyramid, but that does not mean you didn’t go on a journey. This is “energeial life.”
• If the goal of climbing a mountain were to get to the top, that would be a kinetic act. To take it to the extreme, it wouldn’t matter if you went to the mountaintop in a helicopter, stayed there for five minutes or so, and then headed back in the helicopter again. Of course, if you didn’t make it to the mountaintop, that would mean the mountain-climbing expedition was a failure. However, if the goal is mountain climbing itself, and not just getting to the top, one could say it is energeial. In this case, in the end it doesn’t matter whether one makes it to the mountaintop or not.
• Imagine that you are standing on a theater stage. If the house lights are on, you’ll probably be able to see all the way to the back of the hall. But if you’re under a bright spotlight, you won’t be able to make out even the front row. That’s exactly how it is with our lives. It’s because we cast a dim light on our entire lives that we are able to see the past and the future. Or at least we imagine we can. But if one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.
• For example, one wants to get into a university but makes no attempt to study. This an attitude of not living earnestly here and now. Of course, maybe the entrance examination is still far off. Maybe one is not sure what needs to be studied or how thoroughly, and one finds it troublesome. However, it is enough to do it little by little—every day one can work out some mathematical formulas, one can memorize some words. In short, one can dance the dance. By doing so, one is sure to have a sense of “this is what I did today”; this is what today, this single day, was for. Clearly, today is not for an entrance examination in the distant future. And the same thing would hold true for your father, too—he was likely dancing earnestly the dance of his everyday work. He lived earnestly here and now, without having a grand objective or the need to achieve that objective. And, if that was the case, it would seem that your father’s life was a happy one.
• The greatest life-lie of all is to not live here and now. It is to look at the past and the future, cast a dim light on one’s entire life, and believe that one has been able to see something. Until now, you have turned away from the here and now and shone a light only on invented pasts and futures. You have told a great lie to your life, to these irreplaceable moments.
• Since neither the past nor the future exists, let’s talk about now. It’s not yesterday or tomorrow that decides it. It’s here and now.
• Adler, having stated that “life in general has no meaning,” then continues, “Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.”
• That is exactly what Adler is pointing to when he says whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual. So life in general has no meaning whatsoever. But you can assign meaning to that life. And you are the only one who can assign meaning to your life.
• You are lost because you are trying to choose freedom, that is to say, a path on which you are not afraid of being disliked by others and you are not living others’ lives—a path that is yours alone.
• No matter what moments you are living, or if there are people who dislike you, as long as you do not lose sight of the guiding star of “I contribute to others,” you will not lose your way, and you can do whatever you like. Whether you’re disliked or not, you pay it no mind and live free.
• Then, let’s dance in earnest the moments of the here and now, and live in earnest. Do not look at the past, and do not look at the future. One lives each complete moment like a dance. There is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use for destinations. As long as you are dancing, you will get somewhere.
• It is that the power of one person is great, or, rather, “my power is immeasurably great.”
• Well, in other words, if “I” change, the world will change. This means that the world can be changed only by me and no one else will change it for me. The world that has appeared to me since learning of Adlerian psychology is not the world I once knew.
• One more time, I give you the words of Adler: “Someone has to start. Other people might not be cooperative, but that is not connected to you. My advice is this: You should start. With no regard to whether others are cooperative or not.”
• “The world is simple, and life is too.”
• Here was a form of thought, profound in every way, yet conveyed in simple language, that seemed to overturn our accepted wisdoms at their very roots. A Copernican revolution that denied trauma and converted etiology into teleology. Having always felt something unconvincing in the discourses of the Freudians and Jungians, I was affected very deeply. Who was this Alfred Adler?
• When Kishimi said to me then, “Socrates’s thought was conveyed by Plato. I would like to be a Plato for Adler,” without a second thought, I answered, “Then, I will be a Plato for you, Mr. Kishimi.” And that is how this book was conceived.
• It is strange that philosophy should be something that is discussed using words understood only by specialists. Because in its original meaning, philosophy refers not to “wisdom” itself but to “love of wisdom,” and it is the very process of learning what one does not know and arriving at wisdom that is important.