Why Does the Stock Market Rise and Fall?

Whenever the market falls people wonder why it's happening. There are always lots of creative stories and they're probably right to some degree, but the reality is that the stock market is like a mutating organism whose changing mutations have ever changing causes. We don't really know what causes it to change each time and we can't necessarily use past understandings to predict future changes. Still, we make up these narratives because they give us the illusion of control in an otherwise opaque world.