[holy_city]

A better analogy would be the coffee shop (as a physical building) versus the street address of the building. If you want to do anything in the coffee shop you have to go there, the pointer (address) tells you where to go.

And just like real world street addresses, you can't make blind assumptions about pointers.

The value may make logical sense, or it may be completely meaningless and you require direction from someone to find it.

You can't just write down a random address and expect a building to exist at it.

You can hold onto the street address for a coffee shop, put it in a notebook, then one day go to the address to find that the coffee shop was torn down and the street address is invalid.