Potentially hot take, but compression is what I think language is for.
It’s easier to transmit a story than the entire sensory experience of something happening, so it saves us time and attention. Being able to convert complex tasks and ideas into short stories has likely served us well since the brain burns a lot of calories.
I don't think this is a hot take at all, it's matches my understanding. One of the reasons language itself is so difficult (miscommunication, etc) is we have a mostly similar but not identical "compression table" of ideas that words map to, and why we spend so much time aligning on terms, to ensure correct "decompression".
We need compression because internally cognition has a very "wide" set of inputs/outputs (basically meshed), but we only have a serial audio link with relatively narrow bandwidths, so the whole thing that allows us to even discuss this is basically a neat evolutionary hack.
It’s easier to transmit a story than the entire sensory experience of something happening, so it saves us time and attention. Being able to convert complex tasks and ideas into short stories has likely served us well since the brain burns a lot of calories.