The Courage Of Being Disliked Book

[Evelyn Normington]

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It was truly a masterpiece, thought-provoking book based on dialogue between a philosopher and a youth. They are not talking about trivial things, all about life, being individual, inferiority, superiority, self-acceptance, belonging, courage, change, and many more.

So, this book introduced me to Austrian psychologist, Alfred Adler, and his theory of individual psychology & personality. His claims are not for everyone and are very rational, lacking from an emotional point of view since he thinks emotions are tools that can be taken out as needed.

There are many points that were hard for me to formulate, and I still need more time to think about and process through. However, I have sorted my take-home messages, and the things that resonate with me at the moment:

Problems in our lives emerge because we avoid or fail to deal properly with interpersonal relationships. And the truth is that we will get hurt in these relationships and will hurt others along the way too.

Having worth is about being beneficial to the community around you. Someone who is beneficial to their community is someone who has a concern for others, builds horizontal relationships, and takes the approach of encouragement.

There are two objectives for behaviour: to be self reliant and to live in harmony with society. The two objectives of psychology that support these two behaviours is to consciousness that I do have the ability and the confidence in others.

In a world where every action you take can be immortalized reviewed, replayed restructured, re-edited, shared, and go viral, it can feel like the need to bow to social pressure and please other people is stronger than ever.

My problem is that I was constantly looking for approval from other people. Like most teenagers, I was racked with insecurities and the need to be accepted which ultimately led to some pretty stupid attention-seeking behavior.

The courage to be disliked has a lot of core principles. But the three that I want to discuss today are freedom is being disliked, separation of tasks, and your problems are not caused by past trauma.

We have begun rewarding that in my opinion, through things like protest culture and victim culture, and social justice warriors, whereby the louder and angrier someone speaks, the more we change our own behaviors.

First of all, it denies the existence of trauma. It also goes against popular, psychological and psychoanalytical reasoning, particularly that of Freud. It discourages being a victim, which is very difficult for people to accept.

This is a particular type of freedom. He has separated losing from his story of self-worth. Acceptance at the level of being (whether or not I win, I am OK) rather than at the level of doing (I must win to be worthy of acceptance).

The young man also adopts a victim mentality, evident in his conclusion that if only he were like his friend, he would be happier. But, of course, he knows he cannot be another person. So he permits himself not to accept himself by telling a story about why other people have life easier and better than his.

Adler describes a healthy feeling of inferiority emerging through our relationship within ourselves rather than in comparison to others. We have a playful and intuitive knowledge about what we want to improve. We are drawn to plant, grow, and harvest. This is baked into our sense of purpose and meaning as we survive and thrive.

In Punished By Rewards, Alfie Kohn looks at the evidence against the common assumption that people change their behaviour through positive reinforcement like incentives and praise. He points out the conspicuous absence of the long-term in the evidence people use to support rewards, leading us to some unhelpful conclusions.

People DO change their behaviour in the short run when presented with positive outcomes for doing so, but this makes us dependent on external motivation. When the rewards are dropped, so too is the behaviour.

It turns out that we are not incentivised by the behaviour but by the incentive. The rather dispiriting conclusion is that we are less likely to act from intrinsic meaning and community feeling when our reality is built around systematic incentives and rewards.

En-courage-ment is about helping give rise to courage in another and supporting them in becoming more of themselves. Not moulding them into who we think they should be (or who we need them to be for our cookie-cutter convenience).

Narcissism is underpinned by a sense of entitlement to success, power, and control over others. As a result, some people place themselves at the centre of the world and blame their struggles on external factors.

Drawing community feeling from outside the proverbial storm in a teacup (shrinking the whole world to a single place in time) might take the edge off the immediate challenge and give us a foundation to establish a purposeful path forward.

While the idea is based on a decades-old philosophy by Alfred Adler, it was refreshing to listen to him discuss that in the context of social media where the opposite message is pushed so hard: know your audience and feed the algorithm. Make your art for them.

But how could we not? Instagram treats everyone on the platform as creators, the folks who are looking to monetize their content, and so even a hobbyist is nudged to adopt a marketing strategy if they want a chance for their work to be seen by even their own followers.

LEGO is such a great toy to photograph because you can do anything with it like building out a custom scene with bricks to make for a unique and more visually interesting image. Here are 8 LEGO photographers who build MOCs for their photos.

Of course, I also wanted to make such beautiful, colorful and well-edited pictures, but I simply lacked both the skills and the equipment. With a phone, a random jumble of lamps, and a little knowledge, I couldn't do much, so I literally and figuratively drifted into the shadows, but not just because; such aesthetic climates are simply close to me. We even discussed it in my BC feature once.

However, I have to admit, there was a time at the very beginning that I was wondering whether I should try a different style that worked well for others in terms of popularity. But I figured it wouldn't be me and dropped those thoughts and well, I gave myself the right to be disliked.

There\u2019s this great video on YouTube by one of my favorite photographer-philosophers, Sean Tucker, where he talks a little bit about the book The Courage to Be Disliked. In his take, he describes how making art that you want to create rather than what everyone else wants you to create is what gives you power and makes you happy.

I really resonated with this idea of having the courage to be disliked because I felt seen. In my case, I wouldn\u2019t call it courage though. I think courage is something one needs to muster and I simply don\u2019t give a shit about what internet strangers might want me to do for their ephemeral entertainment.

For example, I know a lot of people who follow me on social media are there largely for my custom medieval fantasy characters. I love making them and bringing them to life in a photo, so it\u2019s a good chunk of my portfolio. Nonetheless, I\u2019ll shoot cyberpunk, space, modern urban, or any other theme whenever I want to because I take photos for my own enjoyment and not for anyone else\u2019s.

I don\u2019t worry that people who like my medieval stuff will unfollow me or that the post might \u201Cflop\u201D on Instagram just because I\u2019ve created something they\u2019re not expecting or might not like. Even if people do unfollow me, it\u2019s no big deal because they\u2019re just rightfully adjusting where they direct their attention. Good on them.

Social media metrics don\u2019t mean much to me at all, especially since I know that people like posts for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with my photography, so I don\u2019t use them to guide my work.

A couple of LEGO photographers recently admitted to me that they felt pressured to take bright and colorful photos because that\u2019s what they thought LEGO fans wanted to see, but that\u2019s not how they actually like to shoot. They prefer more shadows and darker themes in their photos, a look that runs counter to the toy brand\u2019s image.

I\u2019m a huge fan of going \u201Coff-brand\u201D stylistically and I\u2019ll definitely lean into shadows for my style of LEGO photography. I think it\u2019s more interesting to subvert expectations and I highly recommend doing that at least a few times in your photography.

Intentionally going off-brand puts the focus back on creating for yourself and trains you not to care about how your photos are received by people on Instagram. You\u2019ve already accepted the reduction of likes in exchange for taking a creative risk from the get-go. I think it\u2019s a trade-up.

I recently read this compelling article called \u201CThe Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine\u201D which explains why social media is so low-effort and boring. The author offers as a remedy to \u201Creserve your likes and upvotes for offerings that truly deserve them\u201D rather than simply deleting an app.

I know that what I see influences my work and my mood so I curate my feed regularly by purging my following list or muting people who make my experience on Instagram bad in some way. Whether it\u2019s low-effort work, \u201Cgreatest hits\u201D photos, or creator drama, I just mute or unfollow people to keep my feed frustration-free.

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