What if your unhappiness is something you chose?
A philosopher claims the world is simple and anyone can be happy, starting tonight. A young man arrives at his study to prove him wrong. Scroll to sit in on the argument.
Enter the studyThis is a book with almost no scenery. Two chairs, one study, five nights. A youth who believes life is complicated and happiness is for other people, and a philosopher, steeped in the ideas of Alfred Adler, who calmly insists on the opposite. They argue. That is the whole book. It is electrifying.
You will hear two voices from here on.
The two voices below are written for this page, in the manner of the book's argument. Not one line is quoted from it. The book's own dialogue is its own, and better; where I have put an idea into a sentence, the sentence is mine and the idea is Adler's by way of Kishimi and Koga. Read the book for what they actually said.
The world is a chaotic mass of contradictions. Happiness is luck. People cannot change. I know, because I have tried.
None of that is true. And by the fifth night, you may agree with me.
You are not
your past.
People cannot simply change. My past made me this way: my failures, my family, all of it. You would have me believe none of that counts?
It counts. But no experience is, in itself, a cause. We are not driven by our past. We are drawn by our purposes. You choose the meaning your past will have, and that choice is being made right now.
Freud asks what caused your feeling. Adler asks what your feeling is for. Emotions, in this view, are not weather that happens to you. They are tools you pick up because they serve a goal, often one you would rather not admit to.
Harsh? The philosopher would call it the kindest idea in the book. A cause is fixed and finished. A purpose is something you are still choosing, which means it can be chosen differently. He is arguing about the shape of a life, not diagnosing anyone; the book is philosophy, and so is this.
All problems are
people problems.
Every time I open my phone, someone my age has already done more with their life. How could I not feel behind?
The feeling of inferiority is not a disease. It is the seed of growth. It rots into a complex only when you use it as an excuse: because of this, I cannot. You are not walking to beat anyone. Compare yourself with who you were last night. No one else is in your race.
Adler's boldest claim: all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Loneliness needs other people. So do vanity, shame, and the fear of failure: each one requires an audience. Which is why every genuine solution is also relational, and why it is never winning against others, but stepping out of the contest entirely.
A healthy feeling of inferiority comes not from comparison with other people, but from comparison with who you meant to become.
Put down what
is not yours.
But I cannot just ignore what people expect of me. My parents, my boss, my friends: their expectations are my life.
Then whose life are you living? Ask of everything: whose task is this? You can lead a horse to water. Drinking is the horse's task. Most suffering comes from carrying tasks that were never yours, and handing your own to other people.
What you make, say, and stand for.
Only you can live your life honestly. This one you keep, fully.
Whether people like what you made.
Reception happens inside other people's heads. You cannot reach in, so stop trying to live there.
A parent's disappointment in the work you chose.
Their feelings are real, and theirs to feel. You are not obliged to trade your life to manage them.
How you answer when someone is unfair to you.
Their behaviour is their task. Your answer, anger picked up or set down, is yours.
Freedom is being disliked by other people.
Not hunting to be disliked, but refusing to trade your life for approval. That someone dislikes the honest shape of your living is evidence you are free. And their feeling about it, finally, is their task, not yours.
Belong
by giving.
If I stop performing for approval, what holds me to other people at all? You would cut every rope I have.
I would replace them with something that holds. Ask not what other people can give you, but what you can give. Belonging is not a reward for being approved of. It is what you feel the moment you are of use to someone.
Even praise gets rethought. Praise is a judgment handed down, and it quietly trains you to need a judge. Gratitude travels between equals. The book asks you to trade one small phrase for another.
“Good job.”
A verdict from above. It feels warm, and it makes you a subject awaiting the next ruling.
“Thank you.”
Passed between equals. It tells you the one thing approval never can: that you mattered.
Only now
is real.
You treat life as a line, a climb toward some point where it finally counts. But life is a series of dots, of moments called now. Dance each one in earnest and the dance itself is where you live. Nothing is on the way to anywhere.
Then I could begin tonight? With nothing resolved, nothing forgiven, nothing fixed?
You could begin this instant. The world will not change first. The view of it will, and you are the only one who can change the view.
The world is simple.
You are what is complicated.
And what has been made complicated can be unmade: one task set down, one comparison retired, one moment danced in earnest. The five nights above are the shape of the argument. The book is the argument itself, where the youth fights harder, falls further, and lands somewhere worth landing.
At the border. This page was written by a machine at my request and edited by me. It is not by Ichiro Kishimi or Fumitake Koga, was not reviewed or approved by them, and is not an excerpt from their book. The dialogue is staged for this page: the two voices are mine, and no sentence on this page is quoted from The Courage to Be Disliked (2013, English translation 2018) or from Alfred Adler.
Where the argument is any good, it is theirs. Where it is thin, it is mine. Back to the border page