I Refused to Read Fiction Until It Was Useful

For a long time, I treated fiction the way a carpenter treats a decorative shelf — nice to look at, but don't put any real weight on it.

I was hunting for an edge. I wanted strategy, history, frameworks I could carry into a Monday morning and actually use. Fiction felt like the long way around. Why read a made-up story about made-up people when Thucydides was right there, telling me exactly how Athens collapsed, and why, and what it meant for every empire that came after?

That was my position. I held it with some confidence. And I wasn't entirely wrong — but I wasn't entirely right either.

In the video above, I walk through how my thinking evolved. This article is the companion piece — the same ideas, slowed down and spread out so you can sit with them a little longer.

The Aristotle Problem

Aristotle once observed that philosophy has no short-term practical application. Which means the only people who historically had time to study it were people with leisure — people who weren't scrambling to survive, to build, to feed a family or run a town.

I've thought about that observation a lot, because I think it applies almost perfectly to literary fiction. The people who read widely in the classics, who work their way through Tolstoy and Faulkner and García Márquez, tend to be people at a particular stage of life. Either they have time on their hands, or they've already answered enough of the urgent practical questions that they can afford to slow down and listen to a story.

That's not a criticism. It's just an honest description of how most of us move through our reading lives. When you're young and hungry and trying to figure out how the world actually works, you reach for the most direct transmission of useful knowledge you can find. You read history. You read biography. You read books about decision-making and strategy and the mechanics of how things get built and broken.

I did exactly that. And I don't regret a single page of it.

But here's what I eventually had to admit: the line between fiction and non-fiction is a lot blurrier than I wanted it to be.

What Makes Literature Great Is Also What Makes It Useful

Think about what it actually takes to write a great novel, or a great short story, or a great poem. You can't fake your way through it. You can't pad it with citations or hide behind data. You have to understand human nature well enough to render it honestly on the page. You have to know how people actually think, how they actually deceive themselves, how they actually love and fail and recover and fail again.

In other words, great literature is philosophy wearing a story's clothes.

That's not a metaphor I invented — it's just what the form demands. If a novel doesn't contain some genuine insight into how the world works, it doesn't survive. The ones that last, the ones that get passed from generation to generation, are the ones where someone sat down and told the truth about something that is genuinely hard to say plainly. They wrapped it in character and scene and conflict because that's the only container strong enough to hold it.

Which means when you read great fiction, you are, whether you intended to or not, doing philosophy. You're stress-testing ideas about consequence and character, about what people do when the pressure is on, about what costs what and why.

That's a strategic edge. It just arrives differently than a business book does.

Bukowski's Camera

One of the quotes that reoriented my thinking on this came from Charles Bukowski. He described himself as a photographer of words — someone who could capture a moment in its truest, rawest form, the way a camera catches light before the subject has time to pose.

That image stayed with me. Because the best writers — in any genre — are doing exactly that. They're not constructing arguments. They're not building cases. They're pointing at something real and saying: look at this. Look at it clearly.

And there's a kind of knowledge you can only get that way. You can read every book ever written about grief, and none of them will teach you what a single honest paragraph about a man standing in his dead father's kitchen at two in the morning will teach you. The argument about grief stays outside you. The story about grief gets in.

That's not a soft point. That's a point about how human understanding actually works. We feel our way toward truth before we can articulate it. Stories give us a felt understanding first — and then the formal reasoning has somewhere to land.

Why Jesus Told Parables (And Why Jefferson Noticed)

This is ancient technology. Jesus Christ didn't walk around delivering position papers. He told stories. The prodigal son. The good Samaritan. The lost sheep. He embedded the deepest truths he wanted to communicate inside narratives that anyone could follow, that anyone could feel, that anyone could carry home and think about later.

Thomas Jefferson — not exactly a man given to sentimentality — understood this well enough that he compiled the teachings and philosophy of Jesus Christ into what became known as the Jefferson Bible. He wasn't doing it as a religious exercise in the traditional sense. He was doing it because he recognized that the parable form was one of the most efficient delivery mechanisms for practical wisdom ever devised. Strip away everything else, Jefferson seemed to be saying, and what you have is a master teacher using story to move truth from one mind to another.

That's the case for fiction, made by two of the most rigorous thinkers in Western history. One from the ancient world, one from the founding of this country. Both of them understood that the story isn't a detour around the truth — it's often the most direct route to it.

The Honest Confession

Here's where I have to be straight with you, the same way I was straight in the video.

Even having worked all of this out, even believing everything I just wrote above — when I sit down to decide what to read next, I still usually reach for non-fiction first.

Not because fiction isn't valuable. It is. But because I'm still, at some level, the guy who came to reading looking for a strategic edge. I'm still optimizing for the biggest return on the hours I put in. And for pure information density, for the kind of direct transmission of frameworks and mental models and historical lessons that I can deploy immediately, non-fiction still wins on that particular metric.

The key word is particular.

Non-fiction wins on information density. Fiction wins on something harder to name — call it emotional truth, or felt understanding, or the kind of knowledge that changes how you see rather than just what you know. Both of those things matter. A life lived only on information density is a life that can tell you everything about a situation and still completely misread the person standing in front of you.

So the honest position isn't "fiction is useless" and it isn't "fiction is secretly the most important thing." The honest position is: they do different things, and a complete reader needs both.

The Stage of Life Question

Going back to Aristotle's point — because I think it's more useful than dismissive — there's something real in the idea that where you are in life shapes what you're ready to receive from a book.

When you're twenty-two and trying to figure out how money works, how power works, how history moves, you probably need to read history and biography and economics before you need to read Dostoevsky. Not because Dostoevsky has nothing to offer you — he has enormous things to offer you — but because you won't be able to receive them yet. You'll read the words without the life experience to feel what they're pointing at.

But if you're still reading only non-fiction at forty-five, you might be leaving something on the table. By then you've lived enough to recognize the truth when a great novelist renders it. By then the stories hit differently, because you've been in enough of your own stories to know when someone is describing something real.

Reading, like everything else worth doing, has a timing component. The best investors will tell you that a great asset bought at the wrong time is still a bad investment. The same principle applies to books.

What I'd Tell My Younger Self

Read the history. Read the strategy. Read the biographies of people who built things and broke things and figured out why. Get the frameworks. Build the mental models. Do all of that first, and do it without apology.

But leave a door open. Because at some point, a novel is going to hand you something that no non-fiction book ever could — a moment rendered so precisely that it feels like your own memory, a character who makes a choice you've been avoiding naming, a paragraph that tells you something true about yourself that you didn't know you needed to hear.

That's not leisure. That's not indulgence. That's one of the most useful things a page of words can do.

My favorite quote — the one I keep on this site — comes from Richard J. Maybury: "Beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts. Many people are twice as smart as they think they are but they've been intimidated into believing some topics are above them. You can understand almost anything if it is explained well."

Great literature is one of the oldest forms of explaining things well. It just explains the things that resist bullet points.

I'm Seth Connell. I write to be read and right. If this piece made you think, the video at the top is worth your time — and if you want more of this kind of thinking, the blog is right here.