With So Much Data, Why Do We Still Crave Stories?

One question I’ve had for a long time, but never formally asked, is:

Why are humans so drawn to story?

It’s one of those things I’ve always felt but couldn’t explain. We love stories.

I’ve noticed it countless times—in school, church, sales pitches, marriage seminars—anywhere. No matter how bored we are with the rest of a presentation, the moment someone breaks into a story, we perk up. Suddenly, it’s easy to listen. We want to hear what happens. We’d even feel disappointed if we couldn’t hear how it finishes, even if a moment earlier we’d have given anything to escape the room.

Even if the story is dull, something about the phrase “let me tell you a story” is magical.

My Old Discomfort with Loving Stories

And yet…I’ve never been comfortable with this.

There’s always felt like a certain absurdity, a certain incongruence, in humans who have access to vast amounts of hard data, science, and modern knowledge, still being captivated by stories—particularly fiction, spun from someone’s imagination and often completely detached from real life.

For me, it was a bit embarrassing—something I felt I should have grown out of.

If I’d thought about it, I would have admitted I saw stories as something for children at bedtime. For simple minds. For people who didn’t have the mental capacity to understand, process, or handle reality.

Every time I came across an article or concept about “the power of story,” I rolled my eyes.

Of course, stories are fun, exciting, engaging—even profound. I love getting lost in a story. But unless it had hard facts or some significant literary message, I couldn’t see it as anything more than diversion. Like a board game.

Whenever someone tried to attribute more value to story than entertainment, I wanted to believe them—but I just couldn’t see it.

Why I Struggled to Write

For a long time, this skepticism held me back from writing. From the moment I formally decided to become a writer, it took me twelve years to actually finish something on paper.

Part of that delay was raising my daughters. But the bigger reason was that I felt I had to justify writing at all. There are journals scattered throughout my house—and probably scattered across the country in places where they’ve been lost over the years—filled with entries titled “Why I Write.” Each one me trying to justify why I would spend my time making up stories.

I never came up with a fully satisfying answer. But eventually, I found an idea that felt enough. Basically, I concluded that life is full of richness—but for various reasons, we can’t really experience that richness while we’re living it.

Writing and stories allow us to take a step back and truly see this richness—to experience it after the fact, removed from the threats and demands of everyday life.

So I guess you could say I thought stories were a luxury—a way to pause life and squeeze the richness out of ordinary days from the safe distance of an armchair. I saw writing like a fine chocolate or a glass of wine: exquisite, but ultimately optional.

But I was missing something enormous.

When Data Alone Became Oppressive

Here’s where things got interesting.

In my development of the Outlinars and the Five-fold Lens, I coined two terms early on: Certainty-Driven Thinking (CDT) and Data-Reflective Thinking (DRT).

CDT, to me, was undesirable because it wasn’t based on data—it was rooted in ideology, a static worldview whose main goal was to maintain a cohesive narrative, rather than staying concerned with facts or reality.

DRT seemed obviously preferable because it was grounded in data and reality.

This became the foundation of the Five-fold Lens—a systematic way to distinguish between the two. CDT was bad; DRT was good.

But the deeper I went into this kind of analysis, the more I noticed something strange—and unexpected: the more uncomfortable DRT felt.

It felt true…but cold. Alien. Heavy, like a weight around my neck. A life lived in pure DRT made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

Which was puzzling.

The Lure of Certainty

CDT, on the other hand—despite its major flaw of not being rooted in reality—felt undeniably comforting, warm, and palatable.

If I’m being honest, I was envious of my more ideologically bound friends. They always seemed to know where they stood. There was no doubt. They understood the world completely, calmly. They never felt the weight I was carrying from trying to stay aligned with reality and hard data.

I wasn’t so envious that I was willing to overlook obvious contradictions or gloss over nuance. But I yearned for that feeling of confidence and certainty.

I was struck hard by a memory from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, where he visits a man who said his grandfather knew how many hairs were in the beard of the Almighty, yet the man himself didn’t even know what had happened yesterday. That was me.

DRT made me feel lost, like I was never on stable ground. I craved the certainty of the grandfather—even though I knew it wasn’t factual.

I could feel the allure, the pull to live a life of certainty over a bleak life of uncertainty, trying to stay grounded in data.

This felt crazy. What was going on? How could I see the factual errors of CDT while simultaneously yearning for it?

The Discovery: Humans Don’t Live on Data Alone

Here’s where I stumbled onto something bizarre.

As I compared and contrasted the actual data of situations with the way people experience them, I noticed there were two different paths—two separate things going on.

There was the raw data side, and the human compatibility side.

The more I tried to push a purely data-driven life, the more I realized that humans don’t deal in raw data.

Data has to be interpreted, compiled, converted into a form we can digest.

Example: A Sunrise

Consider this:

Raw data:

The earth rotates so that light from the sun strikes a patch of land at a 45-degree angle, scattering wavelengths through atmospheric particles.

Human narrative:

We call it sunrise. And for some reason, it makes us believe we can start fresh.

Thinking only about light rays from volatile gases scattering wavelengths through the atmosphere is hard to care about—or even to hold in our minds.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This reminds me of a scene from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Pirsig’s son, Chris, is talking about how his friend’s parents see ghosts. At first, Pirsig’s friend corrects him, saying, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” But when Chris explains his friend is Native American, they change their reply, saying essentially, “Yes, they see ghosts—but not in the way you’re thinking. It’s part of their heritage, part of how they see the world.”

Pirsig asks:

“What the hell is a ghost anyway?”

He suggests ghosts are just ideas—things that exist only in people’s minds. He goes on to say that even real trees don’t “exist” in an objective sense:

The atoms that make them up exist, but the concept of a tree is something humans created to differentiate it from other things. The tree doesn’t know it’s a tree and wouldn’t be a tree at all if humans never attributed that definition and name to it.

Names, concepts, and categories are how humans make sense of raw data.

Narrative: Humanity’s Operating System

To understand the world—to grasp reality—we have to create frameworks that put raw data into a form we can process. Those frameworks exist only in our minds. They’re created outside the raw data itself.

And that concept of a framework goes by other names:

Ideology.

Narrative.

Story.

I’ve often been frustrated with people who refuse to examine issues, and instead simply recite whatever narrative they’ve subscribed to—a narrative not informed by data but created as a way to make sense of the world.

I thought I was above such close-mindedness.

But my aha moment came when I followed this trail of breadcrumbs and discovered something astonishing:

Narrative isn’t just a tool for lazy minds. It’s the only way any of us can make sense of any data.

Just like a computer can’t read raw machine code and needs an operating system to function, humans can’t process raw data. We need to know how it relates to us, our narrative, our view of the world—our story.

And if we can’t find a connection to how something relates to us, it’s difficult—and perhaps impossible—to find value in it.

What I Missed About Story

So here’s the huge part I was missing in my original definition of why I write stories—and why we’re drawn to stories in the first place:

Story isn’t a luxury. It isn’t supplementary. It’s not just how we reflect on life—it’s how we process life in its raw form.

Story is the format the human mind uses to turn chaos into coherence. It’s how we make sense of data, memory, fear, joy, identity—everything.

We don’t just like stories. We think in stories. We are stories.

What I once thought was a beautiful indulgence turns out to be the operating system of being human.

A New Understanding

This revelation turns the whole idea of data-reflective thinking vs. certainty-driven thinking on its head.

If we equate certainty-driven thinking with narrative-driven thinking, the surprising reality is that that’s all we can do.

No one is ever connected directly to “living wisdom” or “living data.” We’re all only as good as the last time we connected to the “Internet of real data.” After that, we’re operating on static memory.

Living Data vs. Static Data

And even the concept of living data is somewhat illusory.

Even the Internet is just a collection of static files—static data, ones and zeros created in static moments—giving the illusion of life only because of how frequently they’re updated.

I realize now that even in the term I created—Data Reflective Thinking—I never said Data Connected Thinking.

And perhaps that’s more accurate. Because the most we can ever truly do is reflect data as best we can.

A New Term: Data-Reflective Narrative

So I’ve coined a new term for myself: Data-Reflective Narrative.

We don’t just have a choice between CDT and DRT.

The more realistic goal is to strive for a data-reflective narrative. We can never escape narrative. The best we can do is plug frequently into real data, to keep our narrative as closely grounded in reality as possible.

Why We Crave Stories

And stories? It turns out the reason they’re so appealing—the reason we always perk up when we hear them—is that, for whatever reason, that’s the format in which we can digest information.

No wonder I’ve always struggled with nonfiction books. As desperately as I wanted the information, I could never get wrapped up in them for hours the way I did with fiction.

No wonder the deepest truths and realizations I’ve come to have been through fiction—things that stayed under my skin.

So now I don’t feel embarrassed or question why I’m drawn to stories—or why I love writing them.

Because stories are the language of humanity.

Final Reflection

Story isn’t an indulgence. It’s not dessert. It’s the plate that carries everything we eat.

“We don’t just tell stories. We are stories.”