Writing & Expression: Philosophy & the EssayThe Essay as Thinking · Zhou Zuoren & the Leisurely · Montaigne's Prototype · Personal Output in the Age of AI
BigCat's Writing
The essay's real name is "an attempt." Over four centuries ago Montaigne named a form essai — to try to think, to try to write. It proves nothing; it just lets a mind think in front of you: following a thought, admitting uncertainty, taking "I" as its subject. Today we look at this oldest yet most modern of forms — why it's a genre of thinking rather than a display of conclusions, how Zhou Zuoren wrote wisdom into the plain and leisurely, how Montaigne invented the "write what I am" prototype, and why, in an age when AI generates essays in seconds, writing one by hand is worth more, not less.
Principle 01
The Essay as a Genre of Thinking: it shows a mind in motion, not a verdict
The Essay as a Genre of Thinking
Paul Graham · essai · process first
The Principle
An essay doesn't display conclusions; it shows a mind thinking. Its value lies not in "how correct the answer is" but in "how honest and interesting the thinking is" — readers buy your process, not your result.
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out."
— Paul Graham, "The Age of the Essay" (2004)
Why It Works
The word "essay" comes from the French essai — "an attempt, a trial." That's not trivia; it's the soul of the form. A thesis starts with its conclusion, then reverse-engineers the argument, erasing every detour to leave one straight road to success. The essay does the opposite: it leaves the scene of thinking — the hesitations, the turns, the self-rebuttals — right there on the page. From a thesis you take away a conclusion; from an essay you watch a mind move. That's why an essay can wander but cannot go slack: it may digress, but every step must be real thinking. Forcing it into "a claim + three supports" kills the most precious thing — that unfinished, living act of thought.
Before → After
"Reading has three benefits: it expands knowledge, refines character, and builds wisdom." (lined-up conclusions, no thinking)"I could never say what reading was for, until it struck me that its use might be its uselessness — it slows me on one thing, and nearly every mistake I've made, I made in a hurry." (a mind working it out on the spot)The first lines up borrowed conclusions; the second lets you watch a thought turn a corner. The essay wants that "I'm just realizing this too" feeling.
"Remote work is good because it saves commute time, raises focus, and improves work-life balance.""I set out to praise remote work for its freedom — but writing this, I keep circling a harder thing: it quietly makes contribution invisible, and visibility is still what gets rewarded."The real point wasn't waiting to be transcribed; it surfaced mid-paragraph. Had you "thought it through first," it would never have appeared.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Personal blogs, newsletters, deep-thinking output: let readers see how you think, not just the verdict
✓ Stuck on a problem? Use the essay to "try to think" — often faster than forcing a position
✗ Mistake: writing the essay as an op-ed — "thesis + three supports" — erasing every trace of thought
✗ Mistake: mistaking "wandering" for "slack" — an essay may digress, but no sentence may be filler
This Week's Exercise + Reflection
Pick a small question you "can't quite articulate" (e.g., "why do I dislike meetings?"). With no outline, write 400 words in essay mode and let the conclusion grow as you go. Reflection: Do "showing the process" and "not wasting the reader's time" conflict? Where's the line between an essay's "wandering" and its economy?
Principle 02
Zhou Zuoren & the Leisurely: writing the small with flavor is harder than writing the grand with passion
Zhou Zuoren and the Leisurely
Zhou Zuoren · the leisurely · familiar essay
The Principle
The hard thing isn't writing big subjects with passion; it's writing small ones with flavor. Zhou Zuoren wrote about drinking tea and eating snacks in the plainest tone, yet hid a whole vision of life inside that calm — plainness isn't blandness; it's flavor held in check.
"Drink tea beneath a tiled roof and a paper window, with clear spring water and green leaves … to win half a day's leisure is worth ten years of worldly dreams."
— Zhou Zuoren, "On Drinking Tea" (1924)
Why It Works
In 1921 Zhou Zuoren wrote "Belles-lettres" (美文), introducing the Western personal essay to China — a "descriptive, artistic" prose that argues nothing and simply renders a mood or a small event with savor. He stands in contrast to his elder brother Lu Xun: Lu Xun's essays are daggers, drawing blood with every line; Zhou's sketches are bitter tea — bland at first sip, the bitter-sweet coming only in the aftertaste. "The leisurely" isn't idleness; it's the wisdom of restraint — not over-stating, keeping the emotion pressed below the surface of the page. This runs parallel to the English familiar essay: Charles Lamb writing about chimney-sweeps and roast pig — trivial, intimate, digressive, yet warm. The shared craft: the smaller the subject, the more you must hold it up with the calm of your tone rather than the grandeur of your content. Push too hard, and the leisure shatters.
Before → After
"Tea is the crown jewel of five thousand years of civilization, every cup brimming with the boundless wisdom of our ancestors!" (emotion overload, hollow)"There's no mystery to tea. The water boils, the leaves unclench, and you unclench a little with them. After a busy morning, to sit and stare at nothing is enough." (calm, restrained, with aftertaste)The first hoists "tea" to the heavens and says nothing; the second writes one real afternoon, and the leisure arrives on its own.
"My morning commute is a profound metaphor for the eternal human journey through the trials of modern existence!""The train was half empty. I watched the fog lift off the river and, for three stops, thought about nothing at all. Then it was my station, and the day began."Grand claims say little; one honest commute says it all. The familiar essay trusts the small.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Personal essays, reading notes, a personal column: the smaller the subject, the more tone carries it
✓ To avoid "inspirational" sentimentality: like Zhou, press the emotion below the surface
✗ Mistake: equating plain with mediocre, then piling on adjectives and exclamation marks
✗ Mistake: mistaking the leisurely for showing off one's purity — true leisure is sincerity, not posing
This Week's Exercise + Reflection
Take one small thing from today (a meal, a commute) and write 300 words in Zhou Zuoren's plain tone — no exclamation marks, no sentimental inflation. Reflection: Does "the leisurely / the plain" still have a place in fast-paced, information-dense professional writing? How do you tell "plain" apart from "no information"?
Principle 03
Montaigne's Prototype: take "I" as your subject; "I'm not sure" becomes a strength
Montaigne's Prototype of the Essay
Montaigne · Que sais-je · write what I am
The Principle
This form had an inventor. In 1580, Montaigne was the first to take "myself" as a serious subject, and to turn "I'm not sure" into a kind of power — he named this tentative writing essai: an attempt.
"I am myself the matter of my book." (Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.)
— Montaigne, "To the Reader," Essais (1580); motto: "Que sais-je?" (What do I know?)
Why It Works
Before Montaigne, writing either quoted the authorities or lectured with a straight face; he was the first to sit down and lay out his own fears, habits, and contradictions. This was near-heresy at the time, yet it founded the prototype of all modern essays. His method has three cores: one, take "I" as the subject — not from vanity, but to glimpse the universal through one concrete person; two, admit ignorance — "Que sais-je?" — making uncertainty a starting point rather than a shame, so he is forever rebutting himself; three, follow the thought, allow the digression. This is the very meaning of essai: not to proclaim truth, but to try, in public, to think. Four centuries later, what Paul Graham writes online is, at heart, still this.
Before → After
"At a certain stage everyone inevitably grows anxious; this is a universal law no one escapes." (faking omniscience, a dead-end verdict)"I can't speak for others, but lately I've felt a restlessness I can't name. I tried to think it through: perhaps it's not loss, but the first clear sight of time." (starting from "I," admitting uncertainty)Speaking for everyone convinces no one; honestly accounting only for "I" earns trust through its candor.
"It is an undeniable fact that all leaders must be decisive at all times.""I used to think a leader's job was to be decisive. But the best call I made last year, I made slowly — and on reflection, what I'd taken for decisiveness was often just impatience."Absolute decrees persuade no one; a self-correcting "I" — Que sais-je — earns belief precisely because it doubts itself.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Personal essays, memoir, opinion pieces: concrete "I" experience beats the vague "we / people"
✓ Uncertain topics: hold "Que sais-je" as a stance, correcting as you write — more credible than forced verdicts
✗ Mistake: turning "writing about me" into bragging or self-pity — Montaigne wrote honest self-examination
✗ Mistake: fearing you'll seem unsure, so issuing absolute verdicts everywhere, turning inquiry into preaching
This Week's Exercise + Reflection
Write a passage Montaigne's way: open with one concrete confusion of your own, and rebut yourself at least once as you go ("but then again …"). Reflection: Eastern culture prizes reticence and shuns leading with "I," while the Western essay is rooted in "I." How should a Chinese essay hold the balance between "writing the self" and "not being narcissistic"?
Principle 04
Personal Output in the Age of AI: text is now free; "you" are the scarce thing
Personal Thinking Output in the Age of AI
Zinsser · the thinking moat · human-AI
The Principle
AI can generate a fluent essay in seconds, but it cannot generate "you." In the age of AI the essay doesn't depreciate — it appreciates — because what it outputs isn't text but the thinking, the perspective, and the lived particulars only you possess.
"Writing is thinking on paper."
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
In the AI age, add: the paper (the text) is now free; the "thinking" laid on it is the scarce part.
Why It Works
Once fluent, competent, well-balanced prose can be supplied by AI without limit, the value of writing shifts entirely — from "the text itself" to "what stands behind the text and can't be outsourced": your distinctive judgment, the pits you've fallen into, the moment you link two unrelated things. An AI-written essay has one fundamental flaw: it has no "I." It never actually drank that tea, never lost face in that meeting. So the smart use isn't letting AI write the essay for you (that outsources your own growth) — it's making it a sparring partner: gathering facts, playing devil's advocate, pressing your argument, flagging vague sentences. Keep "wrestling the chaos clear by hand" as your core, and AI is an amplifier; surrender that core, and you become as replaceable as the generic essay. In a world where anyone can generate text, "what you have actually thought" becomes the last moat.
Outsourceable to AI
Fact-checking · structuring · polishing · playing devil's advocate · generating "correct but generic" competent prose
Not outsourceable (your moat)
Distinctive judgment · lived, concrete detail · cross-domain leaps · a sincere "Que sais-je" · the act of thinking the chaos clear
Before → After
"In this rapidly changing era, we must all keep learning and embrace change to stay competitive." (correct, fluent, anyone could write it — so no one did)"Last week a newcomer rewrote, in two hours, a service I'd tended for three years. My first reaction was loss; my second: what I'd been guarding wasn't the code — it was the illusion of being irreplaceable." (concrete, with an "I," un-fakeable by AI)The first, AI gives you a hundred versions of in a second; the second, only you can write, because only you sat at that screen.
"Failure teaches us valuable lessons and makes us stronger in the long run.""When the launch flopped, I kept the rollback script open in a tab for a week. I never ran it. What I'd actually been afraid of, it turned out, wasn't the outage — it was admitting I'd been wrong in the design review."A platitude is interchangeable; a specific, slightly embarrassing memory is yours alone — and that is exactly what AI cannot supply.
When to Use + Common Mistakes
✓ Personal brand, newsletters, the reflective sections of a promo packet: anchor "you" with experience AI can't write
✓ Use AI as a sparring partner (verify, rebut, press), not a ghostwriter
✗ Mistake: letting AI ghostwrite the whole essay for convenience — what you save isn't labor, it's your own growth
✗ Mistake: thinking "fluent and competent" is enough — in the AI age, fluency is the floor, not the ceiling
This Week's Exercise + Reflection
Write 300 words of essay that must contain one concrete detail only you lived through, that AI could never invent. Then have AI play the opposition and poke holes, and revise once accordingly. Reflection: If AI read every word you've ever written, could it imitate "you"? Where, exactly, does your irreplaceability live?
— Going Deeper —
An essay's worth is in "showing the process," but readers' time is precious — how do you reconcile "honest process" with "economical product"?
They don't conflict; what conflicts is "real process" versus "fake process." What an essay should keep is the informative turns in the thinking — the hesitations that actually changed the conclusion — not all the throat-clearing and treading in place. Montaigne and Zhou Zuoren look "loose," yet every digression brings something new: scattered in form, unified in spirit. Economy isn't deleting the traces of thought; it's deleting the parts of thought with no nutrition. The test is simple: if you cut this hesitation, would the reader lose a genuine discovery? If yes, keep it; if no, cut it.
Is Zhou Zuoren's "leisurely" inherently at war with today's content economy of information density and three-second hooks?
At odds on the surface, complementary underneath. The leisurely offers a scarce "anti-algorithm" experience — when all content grabs, hurries, and sells anxiety, a calm essay is itself a luxury, and so more memorable. But be honest: the leisurely has its place. A decision memo or a technical doc should not be leisurely — there, density is the virtue. The leisurely belongs to personal expression and to places that need a human presence. The key is not to use "plain" as an excuse for laziness — Zhou's plainness is restraint hammered out over time, not having nothing to say.
Montaigne builds on "I," but the Chinese tradition prizes reticence and shuns self-centeredness. How should Chinese and English essays each calibrate the weight of "I"?
In an English essay "I" is structural; drop it and the prose turns awkward. In Chinese, dense "I"s read as vain and noisy. But that's a surface difference: Chinese can ground itself in "I" yet carry the self through concrete things and scenes — say "I think, I feel" less, and let experience speak. That is exactly Zhou Zuoren's way: an "I" perspective throughout, yet almost never shouting "I." So the question isn't whether to write the self but how: explicit in English, implicit in Chinese — but the core is Montaigne's line, to glimpse the universal through one honest, concrete person.
AI can imitate any style — will the moat of the "personal essay" eventually be filled in?
Style can be imitated; experience cannot be owned. AI can learn your word habits, sentence rhythm, even your favorite pivots — but it lacks your life's inputs: that specific failure, that moment only you witnessed, the associations struck off by your unique crossing of interests. The moat isn't "writing style"; it's "the raw material of thought". So the AI-age strategy is precisely this: the deeper you go into "experience and perspective only I have," the less replaceable you are. Write the essay as generic opinion and it gets filled in; write it as "what this particular mind thought up inside this particular life," and it can't be.