Story is not decoration but adaptation: the way finite minds compress reality, survive complexity, and turn an infinite universe into meaning.
For most of human history, the universe felt personal.
The sky moved around us. Events had intention. Gods provided for us in good times and punished us in bad. Meaning was not something you searched for; it was something you lived inside. It was everywhere. The world made sense because it was assumed to be about us.
That assumption did not survive contact with science.
As astronomy, physics and the scientific method took hold, humans were steadily moved out of the spotlight. It was humiliating. The Earth was not special. The sun did not orbit us. We were not the point of the system, just one consequence of it. A brief bizarre arrangement of matter in a universe that had been running for billions of years without reference to human concerns.
That shift explained the universe far better. But it left an uncomfortable question behind.
If the universe is not about us, where does meaning come from? Is there meaning at all?
(We grew bigger at that point, reclaiming some of our old turf, with some scientists speculating that we were evolved by the universe in order to register meaning, for their to be a purpose.)
Meaning without us
A more rational answer is that meaning still exists, just not for humans.
At its deepest level, reality may resolve into pure pattern: mathematical relationships, symmetries, constraints unfolding across time. No purpose in any human sense.
If that is true, then meaning could exist in a way that is inaccessible to us. Not hidden, but incompatible. Like a frequency we cannot hear or a proof too large to read. Meaning that exists beyond cognition rather than waiting to be discovered.
Finite minds in an infinite system
We are finite minds inside an effectively infinite system. We cannot perceive everything, process everything, or care about everything. Reality, unfiltered, would overwhelm us.
So consciousness edits.
It discards almost all available information and keeps only what helps us survive. We do not experience the universe as it is. We experience a reduced, usable version of it. A low-resolution summary optimised for living.
Out of that compression comes not chaos but coherence.
And here’s the point.
Story as interface
The primary format of that coherence is story.
Story is not an ornament we add to reality after the fact. It is the interface through which we engage with it. Story gives us cause and effect, agency and significance.
It is our Google Translate. Our Babel Fish.
This is why story appears everywhere humans do. In religion and science, history and gossip, therapy, politics and play. These are not distortions layered on top of reality. Story is the lingua franca through which a limited mind communicates with an unlimited system.
The James Webb Space Telescope reveals infinite variety: galaxies piled upon galaxies, structure without centre, beauty without narrative. It is magnificent, but it is too much to hold, too grand to comprehend.
Against that vastness we can place Hamlet. Not because it explains the universe, but because it fits inside us. It is equally magnificent in a different register: a complete, navigable universe of motive, doubt, love and consequence.
Why story matters
A species that can turn overwhelming complexity into story can orient itself and find its own pocket of meaning.
It may be that the deepest “purpose” of the universe, if such a thing exists, is mathematical and silent and unfathomable. And it may also be true that our meaning, smaller, warmer and narrative-shaped, is no less real for being local.
If universe is maths, we are story.
It is our fundamental, indivisible particle.