The machines we built can tell you the height of any mountain, the date of any treaty, and the correct way to fold a fitted sheet. They are astonishing, and they have made the world smaller in the way that maps make a place smaller. But they have also created a new kind of luxury: the question that cannot be answered.
What was your grandmother thinking when she kept the ticket stubs? Why do you remember the smell of a house you visited once? Would your city still be your city without the corner that is about to be demolished? These are not searchable. They are not even answerable. They are the kind of question you carry for years and then, one day, answer yourself.
Some questions are not gaps in knowledge. They are the furniture of a life.
The joy is not in the answer. The joy is in the carrying. We should teach the young to ask unanswerable questions the way we teach them to save — not because they will pay off, but because they compound.