Examples Without Concepts

I think that vanilla extract is pretty neat stuff. You can add it to so many dishes and it makes them taste delicious. And yet, if you drink it straight from the bottle, it's disgusting. It's a perfect example of. . . actually, I have no idea what it's a perfect example of. I first came across this in high school and I still have no idea what concept it exemplifies.

Sometimes, I find things that are particularly interesting to me. I think about them all the time. I would love to use them in a piece of writing, but I have no idea what to do with it. If I was pushed, I could certainly find some way to BS meaning from it. With the vanilla extract example, I could say that it is an example of the need to have dilution or diversity; some things are so powerful that having nothing but them would be unpalatable to anyone.

Actually, that sounds like a decent beginning set-up. It makes me think of a story where every character is the same generic archetype. If every character is a witty jerk or every character is a noble adventurer, the world could never work. Conversations between witty jerks would never end because every snide remark would be met with a snide remark that would require a similar response. If every person was a hero, there would be nobody to give out the quests for heroes to take, not to mention anybody to run the inns and markets for heroes to resupply. These character types we love so much are wonderful, but only when they are rare and surrounded other people who are very different.

This sounds all well and good, except for the fact that I'm full of crap. This has nothing to do with vanilla extract. It's me grasping at straws to try to make any connection I can. I like my vanilla extract example too much to sully it with this ridiculousness.

Sometimes we just have examples without concepts. There's nothing wrong with that. Enjoy them for what they are. Just don't try to make it something that it's not.