Perhaps the value of the reference, and our collective heritage-obsessed mindset, is also about our desire to make sense of meanings and changes. To hold onto things and prune them.

“When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while the immeasurable, the qualitative, and the things we don’t think to measure drain away. Bedazzled by quantitative abundance, we might not be able to see what is lost, but we can definitely feel its absence.”