User stories are important because they honor and appreciate humanity

Although this excellent article is about the decline of character driven story telling in movies it also applies to user stories in the digital product design context.

Stories use cause and effect to dramatize a process whereby a person is forced to change.

The extent to which a movie invests in character-based, character-driven storytelling is the extent to which it recognizes, appreciates, and honors the humanity of its audience.

Source: Age of robots: How marvel is killing the popcorn movie | Medium | Sady Doyle, May 2015