Back when stocks were first invented 100% of the profits were paid out in dividends. You'd get some investors together who would buy shares in the venture, hire a ship and crew, sail to India and load up on spices, return home, sell everything, and divide up the profits. Rinse and repeat. At some point instead of creating a new business venture each time, somebody got the idea to keep some of the profits in the company so they could skip the step of raising the capital.
If we look back at the stodgy old Blue Chips of the 1950s and 1960s, GM, Kodak, IBM, GE, etc. they all paid dividends because all stocks paid dividends. That's how investors understood you'd get your money back. As discussed above, increasingly investors and corporations have realized it is more efficient to reinvest all of the profits back into the company. For that reason, the dividend yield of the S&P 500 has been declining for decades.
If we use the Dow as a proxy for stodgy old Blue Chips you'll find it actually is a little less volatile than the S&P 500, but because they are large, well established companies, not because they pay dividends.
When the smoke clears, the money in your bank account doesn't know if it came from dividends or some selling shares. So why bother looking at it that way? If diversification is your goal there may be some value of diversifying into say, small caps or international stocks, etc. however.
