Daily Inspiration Quote by Alfred Adler

Adler’s line has the blunt, diagnostic snap of early 20th-century psychology: what looks like refined sensitivity can be a defensive performance. “Exaggerated sensitiveness” isn’t ordinary empathy or perceptiveness; it’s the hair-trigger reactivity that treats stray comments, neutral feedback, even other people’s moods as personal assaults. Adler’s intent is to flip the moral valence. Sensitivity, often praised as depth, becomes a symptom: the ego scanning for danger because it already suspects it doesn’t measure up.

The subtext is social. Adler’s work on the inferiority complex and “striving for superiority” was built against a backdrop of status anxiety in modernizing Europe, where class mobility, urban life, and competitive institutions made self-worth feel externally audited. If you believe you’re lower on the ladder, every interaction becomes a referendum. Hyper-sensitivity functions like an early-warning system, but it also creates the very isolation it’s trying to prevent: you pre-emptively recoil, accuse, or withdraw, then interpret the distance you caused as confirmation of your unlovability.

What makes the sentence work is its provocation. It punctures the self-flattering story (“I’m just sensitive”) and replaces it with a harder one (“I’m protecting a wound”). Adler’s phrasing also implies a kind of agency: if hypersensitivity is an expression, it can be expressed differently. In today’s attention economy, where identity is constantly mirrored back through likes, critiques, and hot takes, the observation lands sharply. The more public the scoreboard, the more tempting it is to mistake vigilance for virtue.