[thaumasiotes]

> yes a lot of writing is lazy and stupid these days

This is backwards; if you want to see characters taking entirely unmotivated actions, Grimm's Fairy Tales is a great place to look. Modern writing is a lot more concerned with justifying what the characters do than traditional stories are.

That said...

> Stories [...] can teach us about how some actions may turn out

True stories can. Fiction feels exactly the same, but it doesn't tell you how the action turns out - it tells you how the narrator decided the action should turn out. This is often unrelated to what would happen in reality.