Freedom is Being Disliked By Others

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I am a bit of an introvert. This doesn’t mean I like to shut myself in. In fact, I like talking to others quite a bit. It just means that those interactions can take a lot out of me, unlike the extroverts (like my wife) who get energy from talking to others.

For years, I’ve ascribed my introvertedness (which I insist is a word) on my general dislike for Social Media. The thing is, being a technophile, I was early on the Social Media bandwagon. My Facebook account goes back to 2005 when it still had the “I don’t even know what a quail looks like” message on the bottom. I was excited to use it then. Over time, though, I dread posting even the links to messages.

This last week, I finishing reading something I had been tricked into reading by the summary: a philosophy book. It’s a Japanese book called “The Courage to be Disliked,” written by Fumitake Koga and Ichirou Kishimi. It is formatted like a Socrates discussion about the work of Alfred Alder. And, despite some of it being a slog and some of the examples not translating cultures (fear of blushing? Is that a thing in Japan?), it was filled with fascinating observations. Many of which I would love to dive more into in the future.

I want to focus on one for now. To quote the book, “freedom is being disliked by other people.”

I wrote about something like this a while ago, about how no matter what you do, you will be disliked. I used the example of Harry Potter (before, I believe, JK Rowling was under attack for her transgender comments). So in a way, Adlerian philosophy is along the same lines.

But at the same time, it’s a new way to think about it. Adlerian philosophy focuses (at least in this book) on tasks, and whose task belongs to whom. It’s something we get mixed up all the time. An apparently international issue is the task of schoolwork. It is, ultimately, the child’s task to learn. And as much as we, as parents, want to force them to learn something, that is not our task. Not realizing that will just lead to frustration on both sides.

Back to the book: “Not wanting to be disliked is probably my task, but whether or not so-and-so dislikes me is the other person’s task. Even if there is a person who doesn’t think well of me, I cannot intervene in that.”

In other words, we shouldn’t try to be disliked. We shouldn’t purposefully inflame others (a task that seems very out of favor in the media these days). But at the same time, we can’t make others like us. It’s not our task.

If we live our whole lives focusing on whether or not other people like us, we are not free.

Hence “freedom is being disliked by other people.”

This brings me back to Social Media. I avoid it, not for the standard concerns we hear about the platform, but because I worry that what I post will make people dislike me. That’s not how I typically phrase it in my head, but that’s really what it comes down to.

Considering that marketing is done so much on Social Media, this leads to a problem. This leads to me not being free to do what I need to do.

So I’m going to try to be free. If others dislike me, I’ll just have to live with that.

And if anybody has any suggestions on how to get that courage to be disliked, I’m all ears.

The Links

• There’s a lot of focus on burn out culture these days, like this NPR article. I’m still waiting for this to actually change the industry.
• Netflix, apparently feeling left out of the “plus” moniker, is developing it’s own N-Plus. Which hopefully isn’t a streaming service about the streaming service.

Service Dog Update
Sherman is still a great dog that needs to calm the frig down from time to time. It’s been a rough few weeks, and I’m not sure if he’s picking up on it or if he’s just still going through adolescence (he turns 1 this week), but he’s been a bit extra rambunctious. A little more tugging on the leash, a little more playful biting on the hand. Things that aren’t the worse but definitely need to stop.

But we’re still making progress. No fun stories for this week (mostly because my writing above went longer than planned), but he’s doing well.