Neighborhood Stories - do I understand how this works?

Just so you know, toggling the neighborhood stories off in the settings menu only disables sims autonomously making life changes (so no one will have babies, change jobs etc. on their own). Sims your sim knows might still call and ask about making changes. If you say "no" they won't make the change. So you still have control.

If you find the phone calls themselves annoying, and are able to use mods, Bienchen has a mod that stops the phone calls.