Adler, By Accident

I came across Alfred Adler by chance, in a library in Brazil, skimming shelves with no real intention of reading anything, when a small book caught my eye: The Courage to Be Disliked. I read it in two nights, which surprised me; it had been a long time since a book kept me up past midnight twice in a row, in a city I was only passing through.

By the time I was back in the US, I had bought the sequel, The Courage to Be Happy, first online, then in paper. Somewhere between the two, I stopped reading Adler out of curiosity and started reading him because I was genuinely trying to understand something, a longer read that eventually led back through his own writing.

Adler died in 1937, decades before anyone imagined a machine that could write working code. And yet reading him felt oddly current, more current, honestly, than most of what I’d read about AI and the future of engineering.

The idea that stopped me

Adler’s central claim is simple to state and hard to sit with: all of us begin life in a kind of helplessness, and everything we do afterward is, in some form, a response to that early sense of inferiority. Not a flaw to be cured, but raw material. The question is never whether you feel inadequate next to something more capable than you; of course you do. The question is what you do with that feeling: fuel for genuine growth, or avoidance, defensiveness, quietly giving up.

I thought immediately of my own classroom. I teach two courses that both involve students using AI to build software, yet produce almost opposite outcomes. In a cloud computing course for data analysis, students hand a problem to the AI and take whatever comes back; I am not convinced they are learning much of anything. In a course on AI for software engineering, students are pushed to question, test, and hold the AI accountable at every step, and the difference in what they walk away understanding is not subtle. Same tool, two entirely different relationships to the discomfort of not knowing whether the output is right.

That contrast made Adler’s point land harder than any abstract example could. And then, less comfortably, I thought of myself. Twenty-five years into a career built on being the person in the room who understood the system best, and here was a tool that could produce, in seconds, things that used to take me hours. That is an inferiority experience by any reasonable definition. Pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of avoidance.

Not just about AI

What surprised me is how little of this, once I sat with it, was actually about artificial intelligence at all. Adler wrote about a second idea that mattered just as much: that we are pulled forward by the goals we choose, not simply pushed by what happened to us in the past, in a sense the opposite of Freud, whose whole system is built on excavating the past to explain the present. Adler asks a different question: never mind what happened to you, what are you trying to become. He called it fictional finalism: who you become has less to do with where you started than with what you are reaching toward.

I moved my entire career from Portugal to the United States a few years ago, well outside anything I would have called my comfort zone. At the time I could not have named what I was actually doing, only that staying would have been easier and I chose not to. Reading Adler, I recognized it in his terms before I had any terms of my own: the goal was never really the new title or the new country. It was to keep developing, to become more than I already was. I did not know the concept of a fictional final when I made that decision. I only know now, looking back, that it is exactly what I was reaching for.

The part that stayed with me longest

Of everything in Adler, the idea I keep coming back to is the first one: inferiority itself, not fictional finalism, not Gemeinschaftsgefühl, as much as both are worth taking seriously. Just the plain observation that feeling inadequate next to something more capable than you is not a problem to be solved. It is the starting condition of being a person who is still growing. What matters is entirely what you do next.

I see it now everywhere I look. In the student who lets the AI think for them because sitting with not-knowing is uncomfortable. In the colleague who dismisses a new tool a little too quickly, a little too confidently, something I have watched happen again and again in my own research community, almost as a reflex. In myself, on the days when a machine does in seconds something I spent decades learning to do well, and I notice which way I lean: toward curiosity, or toward defense.

That the feeling itself was never the enemy, only what I chose to do with it, is a strange thing to have learned at this stage of a career, from a psychiatrist writing a century ago.

I should say plainly that I am still early in this; a couple of accessible books and a stack of Adler’s own writing do not make anyone an expert. I intend to keep reading, and expect some of this will look different a year from now.

It has already changed the questions I ask: what a classroom is actually for, not just what it teaches; what it means to be a software engineer when the machine can do so much of the mechanical work; lately, and only as a passing thought so far, nothing more, what an AI tool designed with something like Adler’s sense of a person in mind, one that invites judgment instead of quietly replacing it, might look like. And, if I’m honest, the quieter reckoning of what it meant to leave one country and rebuild a life in another.

I even took the idea on the road recently, half seriously, to a room of dependability and fault-tolerance researchers, a crowd not exactly known for citing Viennese psychiatrists. I expected polite tolerance. What I got instead was real engagement, more fun than I’ve had presenting in a long time: apparently a century-old idea about inferiority and growth still has something to say to a room full of people who spend their careers thinking about failure.