How I’d rewrite The Courage to be Disliked
I read The Courage to be Disliked 7+ times in four years. The book has excellent philosophy, but, frankly, lacks clear explanations and practical guidance. Here’s how I’d fix it.
Part I: Evaluating the core claims of the book
Part II: How I’d rewrite it to be more effective
Part I: Evaluating the core claims
Claim #1: Emotional “issues” often have hidden functions
The most important mindset presented in the book is Teleology: the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause.
For example, the book would claim that someone may be depressed not because of childhood trauma, but because depression helps them avoid situations that currently feel unsafe. This mindset is contrasted with the more common “etiology”, which blames today’s problems on past injuries, leaving little room for future growth.
Or, put another way:
Teleology is quite contrarian to our usual way of making sense of these things. It is also extremely valuable. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to resolve my own issues or help others with theirs. Despite this, people really, really, really don’t get teleology. In our culture, teleology is basically antimemetic.1 Understanding it is one of the best reasons to read TCTBD.
But. 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 won’t even engage! A good example is this /r/CPTSD thread: “Do not read the book "The Courage to be Disliked". It contains terrible advice for trauma survivors”. What they missed is that even though the wording is bad and the practical advice is lacking, the frame can be extremely useful.
In Part II, I’ll discuss how to explain teleology better.
Claim #2: All problems are interpersonal relationship problems
I’m unable to steelman why the book says “ALL” problems are interpersonal, but I’ve come to agree that many, even most, 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.
This is extremely true. After researching this full-time for a few years I completely agree. The most popular post on this blog is a translation of this idea: Social anxiety isn't about being liked.
In >80% of cases I’ve seen, the way that people stop disliking themself is they feel safe about interpersonal relationships. (This is true even for people who think they don’t have social anxiety!) When someone dislikes themself, they stoop or take up less space, make fewer requests of others, take fewer social risks, etc. These all have the effect of minimizing interpersonal conflict. This is why I think disliking oneself is a common strategy to avoid being disliked by others.
Teleology strikes again!
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.2 Growth is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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. The book’s advice for these people is basically “you gotta choose to grow,” which is odd because… learned helplessness is often serving a function!
Many people feel like outgrowing their issues is a subtly bad thing. Strangely, the book doesn’t apply the mindset of teleology to the absence of someone’s willingness to grow.
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 just this line: “Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?” This explanation is difficult to apply to real messy relationships, especially when strong emotions are involved.
Here’s how I would explain the underlying concept instead:
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 read your own mind. (For a rigorous explanation of this idea 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.
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 any of these things.
Overall I think this is a great point. (If you disagree, see here.3)
Claim #5: Separating tasks will improve your relationships
The book claims separating tasks “is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.” I actually think this is both very wrong and misleading as it reverses causality.
Like, yes, healthy interaction involves separating tasks. But that does not mean that you can just consciously choose to separate tasks.
I know that because I spent six months trying to teach others how to. I believed that if someone could understand 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?
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. Your intellectual understanding of “separation of tasks” is powerless against strong feelings of insecurity.
Once I noticed this, I stopped trying to teach others how to separate tasks. Instead, I tried coaching people into feeling more secure about interpersonal interactions. This actually worked: they began to separate tasks automatically, without me explaining! (Case study.4) The result is even cooler than what the book says: when you feel secure, separating tasks is effortless.
You need to feel secure before you can separate tasks. You can’t just choose to separate 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.” (Your 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.
I think here the book is making the same mistake it did with separation of tasks. 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 (e.g., long meditation retreats) or luck.
Idk, I spent 5 months “trying to be present” on my own but kept dissociating and wasted a bunch of time, so I have personal disdain for this.
My model these days is that presence is natural, but gets impeded 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 integration of insecurities and meta-insecurities, whether you achieve that through skillful forms of coaching, therapy, meditation, or other somatic practices.
Now, with that out of the way…
Part II: How I’d rewrite The Courage to be Disliked
Improvement #1: A less triggering explanation of teleology
Firstly—don’t say “Trauma doesn’t exist”. Instead, focus on what does exist5: emotional issues with hidden functions. This shift in perspective will also fix the issue of unnecessarily triggering people who feel strongly about trauma.
It’s also possible to explain teleology faster and more intuitively. For example, I’ve found it helpful to drop the term “teleology” entirely and rebrand as “locally optimal” instead.6 For example, back when I was depressed the suffering incentive landscape seemed to be:
More here. Next, I would provide guidance for how to actually use teleology in your life:
Improvement #2: Add emotional and somatic guidance
My biggest disappointment with The Courage to be Disliked is that 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 — for example via skillful forms of meditation, coaching, somatic therapy, etc.
Like 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 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 true for others too.
A rewrite of The Courage to be Disliked that incorporated something like Coherence Therapy or Gendlin’s Focusing (or better) would go so hard!
Improvement #3: Present better skill trees
More broadly, 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. I have hunches about how to do this, however the best way would be to…
Improvement #4: 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 agree with its underlying philosophy. A steelman of its claims reveals many ideas that are both very wise and very unusual. I hope someone writes this steelman because 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: chris@chrislakin.com
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. For details, see here and here.
Case study interview: Man became more secure and automatically started separating tasks. Effects 18+ months later.
By focusing on what doesn’t exist, the book is also failing the “don’t think about elephants” test.
This is why this blog is called Locally Optimal.
This is such a great post, especially in acknowledging the limitations of unnecessarily hostile framings. The LessWrong links were also illuminating; lovely work
Damn, this is really good. I wish I had read it four months ago—it would have saved me a lot of heartache.