Why I hate infinity

I think infinity is the scariest thing ever.

It frightens me to death, to think that something will never end. I like things to end. I like to be able to wrap my mind around them. Even huge numbers, like 1 billion or 1 trillion - though they are unfathomable in their own right - don't frighten me in the way that infinity does. I take a number like 3 billion and I connect it with something (like the world's population) and suddenly it's no longer an enormous number ... it's the number 1. One earth. One population. And suddenly it's palatable. 3 trillion is the national debt. A measly million I don't even have to break a sweat over. And no one ever uses numbers larger than in the trillions.

This is my mental prestidigitation: a take a massive concept and connect it to an object, a fact, or a meaning, and I feel content -- my mind no longer hurts.

We are each the god of our own mental universe and our universe collapses if something remains enigmatic. Even things that we don't know: we say, "I don't know about that thing"; but in doing so we are still creating a strange sense of closure for it.

So when I first tried to grasp infinity, I felt my mind stretch as far as it could and I felt naked and open, because I could never grasp the end of it. It kept just kept going and going. And the worst part is religion has no explanation for infinity and neither does science. We have infinite time and infinite space. Vacuous, enormous, unexplainable. They say nature abhors a vacuum. This speck hates the blackness.

I think that's one of the reasons I stopped believing in God. I didn't want to believe in forever. I wanted things to end. When things end, we can understand them. We can roll them around in our mouths and taste them and spit them out or swallow. That's one thing Shasta's been trying to get me to understand, philosophically: not everything has to have meaning. And Chrissa, of course, has been trying to show me that forever might not be all that bad.