Properly understood, Benjamin’s argument [in ‘The Storyteller’] reveals that the proliferation of bland, solipsistic personal ‘stories’ in our current cultural situation does not indicate a recovery of ‘communicable experience,’ but just the opposite. We tell our stories, all right, but we don’t think of them as offering counsel in wisdom: I ‘journal’ for myself, not for others; the only counsel I can offer them is to do their own ‘journaling.’ I can give them technical advice, but this is not counsel. Indeed, late modernity may even be defined as a culture in which technical advice has superseded counsel, largely because narrative itself has for the past three hundred years been more and more removed from the webs of communal life.

Alan Jacobs, Looking Before and After