This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Courage to Be Disliked" by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you seek validation from others—whether that be online or in-person? Why is that setting an impossible goal?
In a world that is focused on social media and external validation, many people have started to seek happiness through the approval of others. The problem is that other people’s opinions are out of your control and if you rely on them for happiness, then you don’t control your own happiness levels.
Continue below for an in-depth look at how seeking external validation can affect you.
External Approval Isn’t Worth Pursuing
In their book The Courage to Be Disliked, Kishimi and Koga note that even if unhappy people successfully earn the approval of others, they do so at great cost. By seeking validation from others, unhappy people ultimately end up living other people’s lives. Instead of pursuing their own goals, unhappy people follow the expectations of others, sacrificing their own desires (and happiness) in the process. For example, a young adult may decide to go to medical school to please their parents despite hating the idea of being a doctor.
| A Biological Need for Approval There is some evidence to dispute Kishimi and Koga’s claim that approval only makes us happy because we’ve chosen to want it. In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport explains how humans are biologically predisposed to base their happiness on social approval. Unhappy people may not have chosen this goal at all—it’s a drive they’re born with. Neuroscientists have identified a set of regions in the brain that activates whenever you’re not concentrating on any specific task, which they named the “default network.” They discovered that the default network is the same network that activates when humans navigate social situations, indicating that unless we intentionally do otherwise, we’re constantly monitoring the status of our relationships with others. The default network lights up even in the brains of newborn babies, showing that social cognition is deeply rooted in our biology. Does this mean that Kishimi and Koga are wrong? Are we biologically driven to abandon what we really want and live the lives other people want us to? Not necessarily—unlike Newport, Kishimi and Koga make a distinction between the need for social approval and the need for positive social connection. As we’ll discuss in the final part of this guide, Kishimi and Koga would argue that it’s possible to satisfy our social needs through unconditional contribution to others instead of conditional approval from others. |
Unhappy People Must Cope With an Impossible Goal
We’ve established that external approval is ultimately unfulfilling. However, this isn’t the worst consequence of making approval from others your end goal.
Kishimi and Koga imply that the main problem with making approval from others your ultimate goal is that much of the time, this goal is impossible to achieve. In the majority of cases, approval is conditional—others will like you only if you do what they want you to do. This means that whether or not others approve of you is out of your control. Sometimes, there will be nothing you can do to get someone to like you.
After failing to achieve this impossible goal, unhappy people cope with their failure in two interconnected ways, which we’ll explore below.
Coping Mechanism #1: Avoiding the Impossible Goal
Kishimi and Koga explain that when faced with the often impossible task of earning the approval of others, unhappy people often cope by setting a new goal: to avoid trying and failing to earn the approval of others. Instead of pursuing the impossible goal, they choose not to try at all. As a result, they unconsciously manufacture negative emotions such as fear and self-loathing to avoid trying to win others’ approval.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's "The Courage to Be Disliked" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full The Courage to Be Disliked summary :
- Why you care too much about what other people think of you
- How to tap into the freedom and joy inherent in human existence
- How to overcome trauma from your past
