Humans Need Stories

Watching the World Cup these past few days, on top of following F1 all year, I suddenly realized something: when people watch competitive sports, or dig through historical anecdotes, it's usually not really about the match or the facts themselves — it's a hunger for something like a real, true story.

Humans are creatures deeply dependent on narrative.

We need stories — not just fiction floating untethered in the air, but things that genuinely, actually happened. Because at its core, a story is a metaphor for life.

In sports and in history, reality gets carefully distilled and denoised, reshaped into the purest possible drama. Watching cars scream past each other on track separated by milliseconds, or a player pull off an impossible game-winner on the pitch, you get to enjoy that breathless drama while also getting to hold onto its reality with both hands. Because you can tell someone, with total certainty, that it actually happened exactly like that. That's a miracle. Or, you could call it fate.

Sometimes a real sports rivalry, a true-crime documentary, or even a behind-the-scenes look at a musician hits harder than any Hollywood blockbuster. Take Coodie's documentary about Kanye West's early years, or David Tao's stories about locking himself away in what he called "Delivery Room 11" to grind out I'm OK. When you watch these creators fight the record label's commercial logic just to keep expressing what they actually want to say, battling industry bias and genre walls, that kind of real power is unmatched. Their struggle, compromise, and eventual breakthrough within the rules is where the most fascinating tension lives.

A truly moving true story is never told in a straight line. Every accidental turning point intersects with history, echoing between past and future, eventually weaving itself into a vast web of cause and effect that leaves you with a deep sense of fate. This feeling hits hardest when you watch the destinies of these great figures tangle together, or when someone or something completely unrelated suddenly changes the whole direction of the story. Like watching Rosberg battle Hamilton in 2016, only for Verstappen to drop out of nowhere as a prodigy. Or watching that subtle sense of succession when Chen Long won the title right after Lin Dan's defeat. In moments like that, all you can do is marvel — this is a miracle, this is fate.

And yet, when we try to translate these fragments of reality into a conventional film script, the result often falls flat. Take the recently released Michael biopic, or Bohemian Rhapsody back in its day — watching them, I always feel the seams of manufactured craft a little too clearly. A conventional film inevitably carries the fingerprints of being polished against a classic screenplay structure, and that ends up breaking the fragile filter of authenticity. A good documentary, by contrast, keeps life's original rough texture intact while still precisely distilling and denoising the core details — which is exactly the balance that makes it work.

And what might move people even more than these documentaries is watching the sporting events themselves — the least disguised form of reality there is, or at least the one where the disguise shows the least.

The medium a story travels through keeps reshaping how we perceive things, too. In this fast, bite-sized era, social media is saturated with things engineered to look accidental. They extract the most exaggerated, most beautiful slice of life and use the shortest possible path to hit your nerves — and that fragmented, conflict-driven kind of storytelling really does cut through with tremendous force.

Still, I find myself preferring the long, detail-rich kind of storytelling — a deep long-form podcast, or a meticulous documentary. In content that stretches out over that kind of length, you get this immersive illusion of slowly peeling back the surface, getting to know a living, breathing person, standing right inside that detailed, real world. That kind of slowly built emotional connection is a weight that fast, bite-sized social media can never carry.

Whether it's pitching investors, talking to your boss or your team, speaking to young people, or telling a story to all of humanity — people need stories, always. We need that layer that floats just above ordinary life, the emotions carefully packaged by media and capital. Because hidden inside it is our most beautiful metaphor for life, and the strength we draw on to push back against an unpredictable reality.