Micah Hill
Nov 6 · 1 min read

Hey, by any chance have you read ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (and their new follow-up ‘The Courage to be Happy’)? They present some similar arguments to yours about personal happiness — with reference to Adlerian psychology and philosophy.

Broadly what Kishimi and Koga present is breaking down happiness into “taking responsibility for one’s own tasks” (as you say not directly letting people dictate our emotional well being), and how we tend to blame “that bad person” or “poor me” (their words). By extension happy people are ones comfortable with obtaining self-worth with ‘just’ their own existence. They are willing, again to paraphrase you, to take action here and now.

If you haven’t read it, I reckon you’d enjoy it, and I would be keen to hear your thoughts if you do/have. Even as much as I agreed with some of the points in Kishimi & Koga’s books, there were still some sections which were quite personally challenging to wrestle with and accept.

    Micah Hill

    Written by