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The Unbearable Lightness of Being Disliked.

In 1902, Sigmund Freud sent an invitation to the Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler:

Upon his acceptance, Adler became a member of “The Wednesday Psychological Society” (later the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society), whose ideas would eventually become known as modern psychology.

But by 1912, Adler broke away.

Why?

Because Freud was pulled inward—obsessed with the subconscious, with drives and instincts and unresolved childhood conflicts. His lens was microscopic, intimate, intrapsychic.

Adler, on the other hand, looked outward. He saw that a person cannot be understood in isolation. We exist in systems: family, culture, class, school, work, history. For Adler, the human condition wasn’t just internal—it was social. Personal problems, he believed, were always interpersonal.

His belief in change foreclosed on fate, determinism or pathologies as destinies.

More than a hundred years later, Adler’s ideas have been resurrected in a book that’s quietly reshaped the way millions of people think about identity, self-worth, and belonging:

Through a philosophical dialogue between a teacher and a skeptical student, and based on the Socratic Method, the book introduces Adler’s concept of Individual Psychology—a growth-based approach that rejects determinism and asks us to stop living according to other people’s values.

The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga has sold over 3.5 million copies—nearly outselling my own book Little Panic: Dispatches from an anxious life (this is a joke, for anyone new to how I operate).

Despite its deceptively gentle tone, the book makes an urgent case:

We confuse being liked with being safe. We confuse pleasing others with knowing ourselves.

But here’s the catch:

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We are evolutionarily wired to care what people think.

Our brains are tribal. Our nervous systems are social. In prehistoric times, exile meant death. To be cast out from the group was to die alone in the wilderness. That fear didn’t vanish—it evolved.

We still feel it when someone unfollows us, excludes us, criticizes us, rejects us.

The stakes may be lower now, but the fear is just as sharp.

Adler understood this. But instead of pathologizing our fear of rejection, he gave us a new way to live with it—a way to separate ourselves from the entanglements of social pressure without losing our place in the human community.

And it starts with a single, powerful question:

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