Your parents’ disappointment is their homework, not yours.
Suppose you leave a safe job for work your parents think is foolish, and they let you know it at every family dinner. The obvious options are to keep arguing until they come around, or to give in and keep the peace. Both assume their disapproval is a problem you have to solve.
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s The Courage to Be Disliked, a dialogue built on Alfred Adler’s psychology, starts from an axiom that makes the dinner table central: all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Even loneliness needs other people, since it is mostly a sense of exclusion. If that is true, the question at the table is not how to win your parents over but whose problem their disappointment actually is.
Whose task is it?
Adler’s sharpest tool is one question: who ultimately receives the result of this choice? You will live with your career, so the choice is your task. How your parents feel about it is theirs. All interpersonal trouble, on this view, comes from intruding on other people’s tasks or letting them intrude on yours.
That reframes the parent who says “it’s for your own good.” Usually the parent is pursuing their own goals: how the family looks to others, the need for control, the wish to be proved right. The child senses this and rebels. The same logic runs the other way, because if you spend your evenings managing their reaction, you have taken on a task that was never yours. A boundary works the same way: it states what you will do and leaves their response on their side. Families need the line most, because they have the least distance.
The price of being liked by everyone
Why does handing over that task feel so natural? Because most of us were raised to want recognition, and Adlerian psychology denies that you need it. The trap is precise:
Wishing so hard to be recognized will lead to a life of following expectations and their idea of you, and you will throw away who you really are to live other people’s lives.
The person who does not want to be disliked by anyone must keep gauging everyone’s feelings while swearing loyalty to all of them. It looks like attention to others, but it is attention to oneself: even the people who carefully adjust to everyone want to be thought well of. So the book reaches its most famous line: Freedom is being disliked by other people. If someone dislikes you, it is evidence that you are living by your own choices rather than theirs. No One Is Watching gives the colder adult version: the audience was never watching closely enough to authorize your life anyway.
Praise turns out to be part of the same trap. When a parent praises a child, someone with ability is passing judgment on someone with less, and when one praises, the goal is to manipulate someone who has less ability than you. The more praise you receive, the more you come to believe you have no ability of your own, because each approval confirms that someone above you holds the verdict. Adler wants every relationship to be horizontal: people are equal but not the same. A child knows less and can carry less responsibility, but you still meet them as another human being rather than as a subject to be graded. If you are building even one vertical relationship with someone, before you notice what is happening, you will be treating all your interpersonal relationships as vertical.
Not the same as not caring
The easy misreading is “just stop caring what people think.” Adler is not asking you to stop caring about your parents. He is asking you to stop confusing their task with your own. The courage to be disliked is the willingness to show up as yourself knowing that some people will reject what they see, and it is the only ground on which a real connection with them can be built. If you perform for approval at dinner, your parents are not close to you. They are close to a mask.
So where does the courage come from? Not from praise, which only deepens the vertical habit. It is only when a person can feel they have worth that they can possess courage, and in Adler’s account worth comes from the subjective sense that “I am of use to someone.” This is not self-sacrifice. People who give up their own lives for others have conformed too much; contribution is how you come to feel worth for yourself.
That leaves the hardest part. Someone has to stop keeping score at that dinner table first, without waiting to see whether the others will too. Someone should start, and it should be you. With no regard to whether others are cooperative or not.
References:
- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
- Alfred Adler, Individual Psychology