The Courage to be Disliked

From the standpoint of teleology, we choose our lives and our lifestyles ourselves. We have the power to do that. The Courage to be Disliked. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga.

For a long time I had been thinking that I need to make some new friends. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with my old friends, but I seem to do so many things either just with Doug or by myself. And, it would be nice to have more people to sea kayak with, or join us for rock climbing, bushwalking or even trail run with other people. It is hard to make friends in the modern age, and harder still as you get older, and even harder again (that’s a harder, harder, harder) if you are not like most of the people your own age. That, I think is the rub for me, I’m not very much like the people who live in my region and I – at least at this point in life – am too uncompromising to change to assimilate.

If you are interested in numbers, Eurobodalla is actually the second oldest electorate in NSW! The median age is 54, and over 50% of people living in the region have a long term health condition. I’m fairly confident that most of those health conditions are diseases of civilization caused by poor nutrition and inactivity, but that does not change the fact that – based on the numbers – I’m already in the minority.

I binned the idea of the Sunday paddles after a couple of months. That was hard for me because I don’t like quitting, but, as Seth Godin writes in The Dip, it’s imperative to recognise when to persist and when to stop, and, it really felt like quitting was the best option. The paddles were not meeting my goals and no amount of delusional thinking or continued effort was going to change that.

There are local and semi-local bushwalking groups and, of course, I could join in on some of those walks. The problem is, the walks all read like this “Drive 120 km/walk 7 km.” Admittedly, that is one of the worst drive to walks on the schedule, but most of the others are not a whole lot better and the longest walk is 15 kilometres. There is no getting around how much I would chafe against spending most of the day walking just 15 kilometres. It’s not hubris, because I have no illusions about my ability: I’m old and I’m kinda slow, but I’m not that old and I’m not that slow.

Meeting rock climbers has always been difficult and with no local climbing gym or climbing area, meeting climbers becomes even more difficult, and, of course, no-one wants to hook up with a random when the consequences of error are so profound.

So, for many months, I sat with this dissatisfaction in this one aspect of my life. And then I started reading The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. This is a book about Adlerian psychology and focuses on a teleological approach to the human experience rather than etiological explanations. An etiological explanation is a causes b. Or, “I have few friends to do things with because there are not many people in the small community in which I live who like to do the things I like to do.” Teleology, however, explains phenomena in terms of the purpose that they serve rather than the event which caused them. A teleological explanation would be “I have few friends because I like doing unusual things and doing them alone.”

The etiological explanation leaves me with very few options, and is frankly kind of depressing. Conversely, the teleological account opens multiple pathways for change. Any time I decide to become less unusual and more amenable to doing things in a group with other people, I can make new friends. You might argue that nothing really changes except how I am thinking about the problem, but I disagree. Etiologically, I’ve got nowhere to go, teleologically, I have dozens of options.