By Dongmin
In my recent coaching sessions, I’ve been working on identifying my core values. One value that keeps surfacing is freedom. It shows up in a lot of my daily thoughts and conversations. I started asking myself:
What is freedom? What does it really mean to me?
Is it the ability to change my whenever I want?
Is it the freedom to travel anywhere, anytime?
Is it taking time off whenever I want to?
As I sat with these questions, i start to think: these are the things I want—but if I want them so much, why am I not doing them? What’s stopping me? Something felt missing…
I spent a lot of time searching for answers until I came across the book The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. It offered me a new perspective that I’d like to share today.
If you think back to my original questions—about changes, traveling, or taking time off—they’re all external actions, they are the outcomes of having freedom. But what actually creates that freedom? We often think the answer is money, power, or more time. Sure, these help, but reaching that level of abundance takes years of effort—if it even happens at all. So I wondered: Is there another way to experience a sense of freedom, here and now, in my everyday life?
The philosopher in the book suggests:
“If you are willing to be disliked, you can have the freedom you want.”
At first, this sounded bizarre—almost reckless. But it actually makes a lot of sense.How many times have I wanted to do something but held back… just because I was afraid someone might not like it Honestly? More times than I can count.
The need to be liked is a natural human intuition and natural impulse. Kant, the modern philosopher, calls it an “inclination”—our brain’s tendency to seek approval, meet expectations, and avoid disappointing others. But is constantly chasing approval true freedom? If I visualized my life in this way on paper, it looks like a stone rolling downhill—going wherever gravity (or others’ expectations in this case) pulled it—just to avoid being disliked. Is that freedom? Or is it a form of self-imposed slavery? And even if I keep rolling downhill, bending and changing to please everyone…Will everyone actually like me in the end? Probably not. And even worse, I’d lose my shape, my edges—my uniqueness. I’d just become another small, smooth stone at the bottom of the hill. Is that the real me? Definitely not. And clearly, it’s an exhausting and deeply unfree way to live.
Here’s the good news:
We’re not stones. We’re human beings, capable of stopping our tumble, turning around, and climbing uphill— to live against our inclinations.
The real question then becomes:
Can I bear the weight of that freedom? Am I willing to face being disliked?
The book offers a tool to help with this: separating the task. If someone dislikes me—that’s their task, not mine. My task is to act according to my values, with courage and authenticity. Whether people like or dislike me is their task to manage.
Since embracing this idea, the weight I’ve carried feels lighter. i feel less baggage and more space to live freely in my precious every day. Using this mindset, I was able to take vacation with much less of hesitation and be much more present with myself and my family in my recent trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone.
Hope this is helpful, and hope we all can have this courage to live freely every day.
Hakone Zendo 