It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.