Addicted to Infinity

Back in the day, it was only when we were lying down and looking at the night sky that we experienced something that resembled infinity, in some sense. There was a certain infinite-like vastness to the number of stars we saw in the massive expanse of the night sky. That was as far as we could experience infinity in person, in the physical domain. Occasionally, some humans could go to the beach or observe the sea from a cliff, which would give us a sense of largesse. In our minds, we could always imagine far grander infinities, but there was no way to truly experience it in the physical domain.

I feel that, ironically, that has changed in the worst manner possible. The infinite scrolling available on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much any new social media app is one place where billions of us now experience true infinity, almost continuously and on demand, on a 6 inch screen, 15 seconds at a time. Our brains truly do not know what to do with it, and it’s affecting us in weird ways. It’s technically possible to open YouTube and just keep scrolling forever. You could start doing this right now and there is enough content on YouTube to keep doing it until you die. In fact, the scale of content uploaded to YouTube and other social media platforms is so vast that you couldn’t finish consuming it even if you had multiple lifetimes, and that number gets staggeringly bigger every year. A lot of us are addicted to this new form of infinity, and the effects are not pretty.

It’s like we can have full contact with true infinity on a regular basis, personalised to our preferences. I often wonder about the implications of this. What does it do to the human mind? What will it do to us as a civilization? What are we going to witness in this age of AI, where generative content is possible? We now have a whole new paradigm of content creation. What happens then?

When I was a child and reading a lot of sci-fi novels, I imagined we’d experience infinity aboard spaceships that could go at immensely fast speeds and traverse the solar system and beyond. That was the exploration of infinity I had in mind. Little did I know that this is where we’d end up.

My friend Anushree wrote a beautiful response to this — go read it. Her point: the night sky humbles you and lets you go. The scroll just wants to swallow you whole.