I read The Courage to be Disliked 7+ times in four years. The book has excellent philosophy but lacks clear explanations and practical guidance. Here’s how I’d rewrite it.
As I see it, the book has 7 main claims:
- Claim #1: Emotional issues often have hidden functions
- Claim #2: All problems are interpersonal relationship problems
- Claim #3: Whether you outgrow your issues is your choice
- Claim #4: You are autonomous, and so are other adults (Separation of tasks)
- Claim #5: Separating tasks will improve your relationships
- Claim #6: People need to feel like part of a greater whole
- Claim #7: You can choose to be present
First I’ll analyze these 7 core claims, and then share my overall judgment and how I’d rewrite the book.
Part I: The core claims
Claim #1: Emotional issues often have hidden functions
The most important analytic tool presented in the book is Teleology: explaining phenomena through their purpose, rather than their cause. The book applies this analytic tool to emotions.
For example, the book would claim that someone may be depressed not because of past childhood trauma, but because being depressed helps them avoid situations that feel unsafe now. This mindset is contrasted with the default “etiology”, which blames today’s problems on past injuries.
Teleology might be understood as grasping at the idea that seemingly ‘negative’ patterns might actually be “locally optimal”. For example, someone who is depressed person might have an emotional incentive landscape that looks like this:
Teleology is fairly at odds with the current popular way of emotional sense-making. However, I’ve found it extremely valuable in solving my own issues and helping others solve theirs.
Despite this, people really, really, really don’t get teleology. In our culture, teleology is basically antimemetic.[1] It is one of the best ideas in TCTBD.
However, the book’s explanation is awful. The part that aims to explain it is literally titled: “Trauma Does Not Exist.” This wording needlessly triggers many of the people who could benefit most from it, to the point that they advise others not to read the book, keeping it antimmemetic. For example, see this /r/CPTSD thread: “Do not read the book "The Courage to be Disliked". It contains terrible advice for trauma survivors”. Yes, the wording is bad, yes, practical implementation advice is lacking… and yet the frame is extremely useful.
Claim #2: All problems are interpersonal relationship problems
It’s difficult to steelman the book’s claim that “ALL” problems are interpersonal, but I’ve personally come to agree that many, maybe even most, human problems are social. This gets at the second most important point in the book:
You were so afraid of interpersonal relationships that you came to dislike yourself. You’ve avoided interpersonal relationships by disliking yourself.
I’ve thought about this for a few years and completely agree. For example: in the vast majority of cases I’ve seen, the way that people stop disliking themselves is by feeling safe in their interpersonal relationships. (This is true even for people who didn’t think they felt unsafe!) When someone dislikes themself, they stoop or take up less space, make fewer requests of others, take fewer social risks, and so on. These all have the effect of minimizing interpersonal conflict and minimizing dislike.
People generally don’t stop disliking themselves until they’re ready to be disliked by others. Disliking oneself often appears strategic.
Claim #3: Whether you outgrow your issues is your choice
From the book:
Whether you go on choosing the lifestyle you've had up till now, or you choose a new lifestyle altogether, it's entirely up to you.
Growth follows from the belief in growth. That is, growth is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the inverse is also true: if you believe you can’t grow, you probably won’t. Many people have this. “Learned helplessness,” it’s called.
Basically, it’s false positive vs false negative errors. If you believe you can grow then you’ll always try to and grow in all the ways you actually can. If you believe you can’t you’ll never try and not grow even when you could. The belief drives what happens, “justifying” itself retroactively.
Because of this, the book’s advice for people stuck in the belief they can’t grow is basically… “you gotta choose to grow”. But that’s odd because learned helplessness is often serving a function, as per teleology/local optimality! Many people feel like outgrowing their issues is secretly a bad thing.
Puzzingly, the book doesn’t apply the mindset of teleology to the absence of someone’s willingness to grow. (You’ll notice this is a trend in the book.)
Claim #4: You are autonomous, and so are other adults (Separation of tasks)
The book introduces a concept called “Separation of tasks” to show what healthy interpersonal interaction looks like. However, the description of how to separate tasks is so muddled that I entirely missed it the first four times I read the book. It’s mostly just this line: “Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?”
Here’s a short explanation I prefer:
You can’t fully control how other people feel or behave. You can’t fully read others’ minds. Other people can’t fully control how you feel or act. Other people can’t fully read your mind.
Every adult is autonomous: you can only control your own behavior and you can only read your own mind. (For a more rigorous explanation, see my posts on Markov blankets and causal distance.) These limits reveal that there are natural boundaries that separate where my “tasks” end and yours begin.
According to the book, most interpersonal conflicts involve a failure to acknowledge these natural boundaries: trying to force others to feel differently, presuming we know others’ mental state, expecting others to fix our feelings, or hoping others will read our minds. Meanwhile, healthy interactions are characterised by not trying to do these things.
Overall, although I personally think this is a great point based on my experience. (If you disagree, see here.[2]) However, I’ve found it’s difficult to apply to real messy relationships, especially when strong emotions are involved— which brings me to Claim #5.
Claim #5: Separating tasks will improve your relationships
The book claims separating tasks “is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.” I don’t get this — it reverses causality.
Yes, healthy interaction involves separating tasks. But that does not mean that you can just consciously choose to start separating tasks.
I know because I spent six months trying to teach others how to separate tasks. I believed that if only someone could intellectually understand the idea of separation of tasks, then they’d be able to separate them and stop having so many unnecessary interpersonal conflicts.
Completely wrong. I tried to teach a bunch of smart friends, and they would like the idea, explain it back well, etc., but every time they got into a real conflict, their understanding of how to separate tasks completely fell apart. Huh?
In their defense: imagine there was only one person in the world who could give you food. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to prevent them from disliking you, try to read their mind, etc.? Wouldn’t you completely fail at separating tasks?
When you feel like other people have things you can’t go without, then you have extremely strong incentives to manipulate them. The rarefied intellectual understanding of “separation of tasks” is powerless against visceral feelings of insecurity.
Once I noticed this, I stopped trying to teach others how to separate tasks and, instead, tried coaching people into feeling more secure about interpersonal interactions. This actually worked: they began to separate tasks automatically, without me explaining how![3] (The result is even cooler than what the book says: it’s effortless.)
Again, the causality is reversed: you generally need to feel secure before you can separate tasks. You probably can’t just choose to start separating tasks while under strong incentives to be bad at separating tasks.
Claim #6: People need to feel like part of a greater whole
The book calls this idea community feeling: humans thrive when they believe “my effortless existence benefits the group.” and, according to the book, our group/community could be people, animals, or even the cosmos.
Crucially, you can’t ever really know whether you’re actually benefiting others — maybe everyone is lying to you, maybe the person you’re helping is actually baby Hitler, etc. — instead you just have to have faith in your own intentions to do good and help others. Having that faith is a choice.
I like this part of the book; I have no additional suggestions. I wrote more about it here.
Claim #7: You can choose to be present
if one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.
Do not treat [life] as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots.
Again, this looks like reverse causality to me.
It’s claiming you can choose to be present, when in reality you probably can’t. I haven’t seen this advice work except through extreme brute force, like repeated long meditation retreats, or pure luck.
My model these days is that presence is natural, but gets blocked by emotional insecurities. Simple teleology: if you have difficulty being present, there’s probably a hidden function! The way to resolve this is not through further conscious mindset or choice, but through unlearning — which usually involves some skillful form of coaching, therapy, meditation, or somatic practices.
Which brings us to…
Part II: Rewriting “The Courage to be Disliked”
Improvement #1: Somatic and emotional guidance
My biggest disappointment with the book is that it lacks all and any emotional and somatic guidance. Despite being about “how to change your life” (the subtitle of the book is “The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness”), it’s ~100% focused on intellectual understanding and ~0% focused on emotional understanding. But conscious understanding isn’t enough; you need to feel.
Like probably most readers, I had a bunch of emotional objections to the book after first reading it. I had to do extensive emotional work to determine how I felt about the underlying philosophy. Eventually I found that most of my objections came from locally optimal emotional insecurities. After my insecurities fell away, I no longer objected to the conclusions of the book. I’ve found this to be true for others too.
A rewrite of The Courage to be Disliked that incorporated somatic practices would go so hard!
Improvement #2: Present better skill trees
More broadly, I think there’s a skill tree for personal growth: you must progress in a valid order. But some of the advice in this book implies that you should work on Level N skills (separating tasks, being present) before you have Level N-1 skills (having the courage to be disliked, feeling secure about stuff) — ???
If I rewrote the book, I’d flesh out a better skill tree for how to follow advice for different stages of the path, for example: Bottlenecks to unlearning your anxiety.
Improvement #3: Validate the rewrite on real people!
There’s a reason why I had to read The Courage to be Disliked 7+ times (and its sequel The Courage to be Happy 3+ times) over four years: I had to do most of the thinking on my own time!
Everything in this post makes me wonder… Did the authors not test their book? As in: give the draft to representative people with issues the book aims to address, have the people read it, interview them to see if they correctly understand it, and follow up a few months later to see if those issues improved?
I would guess they didn’t! (Do you know anyone who deeply applied the philosophy because of reading about it in this book? I don’t!) This is crazy to me.
If I rewrote The Courage to be Disliked, I would test the new instructions to see if they have their intended effect on readers.
Conclusion
While I dislike much of the literal wording in The Courage to be Disliked, I deeply appreciated its underlying philosophy of teleology. Unfortunately the book falls short of adhering to its own core philosophical piece, often reverses causality in its advice-giving and, in addition, lacks emotional/somatic guidance.
A steelman of this book would reveal many ideas that are both unusual and wise. I hope someone writes that steelman, it could help a lot of people.
If you’d like to rewrite this book using AI (e.g., perhaps using this post as a prompt), contact me.
If you have questions about the contents of the book, you can copy the full text into AI for discussion.
- ^
In the past, when I tried to explain to others, “Emotional issues are often useful right now in the present”, they often replied, “Oh so it was useful at some point in the past but it’s not useful anymore?” And I’d say, “No, useful RIGHT NOW.” Finally, they say, “Oh, because evolution created this behavior but it doesn’t help in the modern environment!” ……… Fortunately this stopped when I found the “locally optimal” framing.
- ^
In the past three years I’ve spoken to dozens (hundreds?) of people who find this concept objectionable. But after spending hundreds of hours thinking about it and running two adjacent AI safety and category theory workshops, this remains my conclusion. Most objections seem due to emotional insecurity. Read more.
- ^
Case study interview: Man became more secure and automatically started separating tasks. Effects 18+ months later.