I think of it as collecting fossils and treating them like they are 'just' rocks as we build our houses of who we are. They aren't just rocks, they are fossilized informative little nuggets of beaucoup information of what we know, don't know, and can never know but somehow are there in who we are, sometimes drawing us and others in and sometimes pushing us and others away for infinite series of reasons, like saddle points in physics. Fossilized little saddle points that make us all up that we think it's easy to sort into predictive data points. We're funny like that.