I have always been the kind of person who likes to reason things out. Before I began deliberately collecting stories, I would take concrete stories and boil them down into abstract lessons, then file them away in memory under categories.
When I was a child, I was often left among a group of aunts, serving as a witness to their stories. They liked me because I was a good listener. Over time I learned their routines for getting attention: when they would tear up, when they needed me to play the skeptic and challenge them, so that they could reach the 'but' in the story. And so their vivid lives got filed away by me, coldly, as categories.
Reasoning easily takes over in two states: 'I already understand what you are saying' and 'I do not want to understand what you are saying.' The more someone distinguishes themselves from the group by being unique and different, the more easily reasons become a way to cover over stories—using words to understand the world as quickly as possible, or even to bend the world back into one's own cognitive system.
When I used to tell people about a novel I was writing, I always drifted into its 'real-world significance'—the lesson the novel was supposed to leave readers with. The process was fascinating, because explaining the lesson meant 'I can see the world more clearly,' and that proved I was independent, not part of the herd. But whenever someone asked me to explain in one sentence what the story was about, I froze: I could not briefly describe the protagonist, the conflict, and the goal. I had spent so much time chasing the so-called real meaning that the meaning was not something the protagonist told the reader. It had to come from me, the outsider who had carefully built that brave new world.
If Nobody Wants a Lecture, Who Is It For?
People can publish opinions easily online, and once some opinions become common knowledge, reasoning at people starts to equal 'dad energy.' It is a two-way standard: if the person being lectured does not accept it, does not agree, or simply does not like the speaker, the behavior can be labeled dad energy. Reasoning is just the most visible surface. Conversely, because it is a surface judgment, it can cover all opinion output. As long as I subjectively dislike the other person's view, there is conflict, or I simply dislike them, I can treat every opinion except my own as lecturing.
So it is not that people dislike reasoning. It is that people can define others' behavior at any moment, and that makes the conversation impossible unless both sides can actually discuss views objectively and rationally instead of covering the other person's behavior with a subjective judgment first.
Still, reasoning is sometimes necessary.
My family once held a family meeting about whether my grandmother should go to a nursing home. She raised the idea herself, but the meeting was about the reasoning after that decision. My father, uncle, and aunt laid out the pros and cons and what responsibility she would personally bear. They did not simply veto the plan. They wanted to avoid a later situation where, if she was unhappy, she would blame all the children for dumping her there.
Most of the time my grandmother is not rational. She habitually wraps her children and grandchildren in emotion and moral blackmail. When she had to face the facts and see the reasoning behind her own decision, all her possible escape routes for moral blackmail were cut off. Some people would call this unfilial. Once you start reasoning, you have to return to the level of discussing the thing itself. And when everything is laid out clearly, the old emotional entanglement and moral blackmail become rational and, in a way, cold.
The Lesson in the Story, and the Story Behind the Lesson
In TV, especially talk shows, the host would rather have a guest use stories than lessons. Instead of asking what hard work means to them, ask what they did for this day that others did not approve of. The host is not guiding the guest toward a lesson but toward the story behind the lesson. The audience does not want the lesson itself. They want a story that resonates and leads to a lesson each person understands in their own way.
Compare these two lines:
'Young people should not stay up late, because this is the age when they need a lot of cortisol, and good sleep also keeps their hormone levels stable when they enter middle age.'
'Many people around me hit 30 and suddenly feel exhausted and have disrupted sleep. A lot of them complain to me that they can no longer pull all-nighters.'
You can immediately feel who is stating a lesson and who is using a story to lead toward a lesson that can be questioned further.
An argument is extremely easy to refute, because it is often built on negating another view. If we use TV logic, political debate programs actually need reasoning, because only then does conflict arise. Storytelling does not build credibility through opinion. It uses the identifiability of plot, so the listener understands the encounter, the conflict, and finds a similar fate in their own experience.
From a philosophical angle:
- Reasoning is Platonic. Truth can be discovered and expressed; everything can be analyzed logically.
- Storytelling is Nietzschean. Truth hides in myth and metaphor; everything can be nonrational, even emotional and concrete.
Put simply, Plato thinks truth is the discrete reasons left after the world has been taken apart. People should not stay up late because it damages the body. Nietzsche thinks truth is the metaphor behind the story. Sleep is when a person is closest to the self; dreams are feedback from reality and prophecy of the future. Much of Chinese storytelling expresses its lesson in this indirect way.
This also fits Nietzsche's broader aesthetics: beauty comes from the dazzling light of humanity when facing difficulty, contradiction, even death—people are the protagonists of stories, and stories are the carriers of lessons.
- The lesson in a story does not care about the background; it cares what lesson is finally presented.
- The story behind a lesson hands the definition to the reader, letting them understand a lesson of their own behind each story.
The People in Stories, and the People Who Tell Them
This is where reasoning and storytelling part ways. Reasoning looks for the exact answer to the world's truth; storytelling keeps digging into the moving, thought-provoking flashes behind the story.
I once slipped into a writing course to see how they created pay points. A writing course is supposed to teach people how to write—wait, is that not an innate ability? Everyone has the capacity and impulse to express, just through different carriers. So the early part of the course kept implanting the concept of 'why write,' preparing people psychologically. Every day they discussed what to prepare: mindset, ideas, inspiration, equipment. In that discussion they inevitably entered the discussion and fantasy of 'real-world significance.' Since real-world significance is not something you can see results for immediately, the fantasy around it can be filled with impractical, grand, even daydream-like material.
Then came the first pay point. Since everyone was addicted to the pleasure of reasoning, any immediate feedback would reinforce the real-world significance of the fantasy. After paying for a subscription, the writing group posted a theme every day or week, and everyone wrote around it. Once people produced good writing, the group formed a state of mutual encouragement and positive feedback. The group effect gave individuals stronger feedback.
Step out of that frame and you can pick any word and start expressing your thoughts, recalling childhood, imagining the future—that is the essence of writing. But after the earlier atmosphere, especially after becoming addicted to the pursuit and illusion of real-world significance, the most basic act of 'write now' was given a strong sense of ritual and mission. What people paid for was not the daily or weekly theme. It was having someone witness their real-world significance in writing. Even if they could not keep going, that real-world significance could still function as spiritual dry rations.
I was later refunded and removed from the writing course. The reason: I kept not writing according to the theme, and sometimes I manipulated the theme. I raised the view that if you want to write, write—why wait for a theme to be published? I forced a discussion about whether the real-world significance of writing was writing or thinking about why to write. That is another story.
Every time a theme was posted, I read the participants' work carefully. Most wrote their own stories: memories, lessons, an experience, a diary. It had nothing to do with the real-world significance they had discussed at the start. They believed writing was not only recording oneself but connecting with others, yet their stories were always their own. They were dry or detailed, but they were their stories. There was no exchange between them. It was as if each went on stage to perform a solo dance, and the people sitting in the audience were not an audience but other actors fantasizing about how they should dance when their turn came. To extend Nietzsche: the soul of a story is the person in the story, not the person telling it.
First the Story, Then the So-Called Real Meaning
I do not think there is a right or wrong side between storytelling and reasoning. If anything here is mocked, it is that writing course, because it wrapped the simplest core of writing—'go write now'—in a complicated commercial core that exploited group effects, and did it badly.
Storytelling has a method: person—conflict—motivation—choice—result. Following this module does not necessarily make a formulaic story; it increases people's perception of the story.
- A person is the protagonist, so first introduce the person with a representative story.
- Compare 'He is gay' with 'He is a closeted gay man from a family of police officers.'
- Compare 'He cheated and got caught' with 'He slept with his brother's wife, and when his brother found out, his brother cut off his penis.'
- Conflict is the skeleton of the plot. If it is bland, why tell a story?
- The closeted man from a police family is recently discovered by his wife. She realizes he has been cheating with men, so she is working with her best friend to design a trap to catch him.
- Motivation is the character's thinking when facing conflict. If he thinks, fine, whatever, there is no later plot.
- The husband realizes his behavior is exposed. He wants to turn things around, avoid being caught, and avoid having the fact that he is closeted exposed in a police family. So he decides to use his counter-surveillance skills to design a trap for his wife.
- Choices in fiction are mostly choices the character must face, like cutting the red or blue wire on a bomb. In reality, many choices are forced or have no alternative, but that is still a choice, because people do not choose options that are bad for them.
- The husband uses his wife's knowledge of his affair. He deliberately leaves evidence on his phone of affairs with 'women,' so the wife will think his affair partner is not a man but a woman. That protects his reputation in the family.
- Sometimes a story does not need a result, because the result is exactly what people will discuss and what will generate more conversation.
- The story of the closeted man from the police family that I mentioned on Telegram is paused for now, leaving suspense. At least I want to keep following it, or it can naturally produce a lesson. Sometimes going along with the scheme is not bad; using the gaslight effect can protect the real secret.
Sometimes a story needs no conclusion or lesson. In a piece I called 'Asking With the Answer Already in Hand,' I told the story of my younger sister and her father. A friend drew a lesson from it about what to avoid when raising children in the future. That may be the real-world significance.
What Can I Write About?
I wrote this because someone messaged me on Telegram asking a simple question: What can I write about? Following my usual habit of answering questions, I asked why he wanted to write. He did not go around in circles talking about the real-world significance of writing. He said he had an urge to express but did not know what to write. I asked whether he had tried the 'theme word' logic. He said those were not the themes he wanted to write. Then what did he want to write? He wanted to tell stories—his own, those of people around him, or imagined ones—but he was afraid that a story without a lesson would not resonate.
I gave him a short answer and decided to answer him properly with this essay. The question is not storytelling versus reasoning, nor the meaning of storytelling. The question is the story itself. The stories that are real, not deliberately performed, settled through the self—those are the flesh and blood of a story. The lesson may be nothing more than one incisive line of dialogue.