: Re: Can I assign actions to broad concepts? Whenever I write, I run into the problem where I have to assign human actions to subjects that, when I contemplate about it, cannot realistically perform

@Karen856

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Two things:

There is a term in Philosophy called Fallacy
Philosophers and Creative Writers don't always see eye to eye.

To address the first matter: I'm not a professional philosopher, but I'm pretty sure that your teacher has introduced you to one of the fallacies. There's a list of 224 of the most common ones on this page of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I'm not entirely sure which of the fallacies this is, but here's the bumph from Wikipedia about the scientific interpretation of the (entertainingly named) Pathetic Fallacy:

In science, the term "pathetic fallacy" is used in a pejorative way in
order to discourage the kind of figurative speech in descriptions that
might not be strictly accurate and clear, and that might communicate a
false impression of a natural phenomenon. An example is the
metaphorical phrase "Nature abhors a vacuum", which contains the
suggestion that nature is capable of abhorring something. There are
more accurate and scientific ways to describe nature and vacuums.

Another example of a pathetic fallacy is the expression, "Air hates to
be crowded, and, when compressed, it will try to escape to an area of
lower pressure." It is not accurate to suggest that air "hates"
anything or "tries" to do anything. One way to express the ideas that
underlie that phrase in a more scientific manner can be found and
described in the kinetic theory of gases: effusion or movement towards
lower pressure occurs because unobstructed gas molecules will become
more evenly distributed between high- and low-pressure zones, by a
flow from the former to the latter.

Now, I'm not saying that your examples fall within the Pathetic Fallacy, but there are certainly some points of convergence. Maybe one of the others fits more closely, but I'll leave you to explore for yourself.

To address my second point: you've inserted this question into a Writing Community, and so you'll find answers here that focus on aspects of writing. For a writer, anthropomorphic language, metaphors and similes are bread and butter. (And no, not literally - but that goes towards my point.)

In this space, you will find a whole host of arguments to support the use of the kind of language used in your first set of examples. Again, I'll let you explore those at your leisure, but you'll find that, on the whole creative-writers are not professional philosophers and so might well disagree with them as to whether it's 'proper' to use such language.

Perhaps your teacher was approaching the matter from a philosophical/fallacy point of view and so was maybe correct in terms of that arena. But now that you are, yourself, grown up, you can put away those limitations and live freely as a writer.

In other words: go forth and use language fully, wildly and with exuberant excess. And if anyone tells you that you can't - feel free to laugh and carry on regardless.

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