A Philosophy for Infinity

We Live in Infinity

Not infinity in the sense of "very large" or "without boundaries," but infinity in a more fundamental way: everything that exists is happening simultaneously in an interconnected now. There is no cosmic past stored somewhere, no predetermined future waiting to unfold. There is only the infinite present - reality occurring now, from the microworld to the cosmos, without center and without ultimate direction.

Stop a second and think about it. Try to grasp the idea that everything, everywhere is occurring right now. From the farthest galaxy to the atoms in every inch of your body. And that there is no other thing outside that, neither in space or time.

But humans are not the center of this infinite reality. Reality was not made for us. The human species is one particularity among infinite particularities, and reality is utterly indifferent to whether we exist or not. This may sound bleak, but this essay argues the opposite: it's quite the catch! Just follow me.

Meaning-Making: The Human Tool

Facing an infinite, radically indeterminate and indifferent reality, humans developed the most sophisticated coordination tool that has ever emerged from evolutionary processes: meaning-making.

The capacity to generate shared frameworks that condense the overwhelming complexity of existence into navigable structures. When we say "democracy" or "freedom", we are not discovering eternal truths written into the fabric of reality. We are building meanings that make collective action possible and worthwhile.

This is humanity's evolutionary advantage. Meanings delimit infinite options for action, reduce indeterminacy enough to make collective life possible, enable coordination at scales other species cannot achieve.

Three Stages of Meaning-Making

We can roughly say that meaning-making evolved through three main stages:

Animal intuition - the body's direct, pre-linguistic response to external stimuli. The sense of hunger, danger, warmth. Meanings the body can interpret alone, shared through basic signals within groups.

Language - the ability to attach signs to significance and share them across generations. This enabled increasingly complex coordination - naming water "water" and fire "fire" to coordinate tasks involving them, building intersubjective networks of concepts and narratives passed through time.

Arbitrary meaning-making - the construction of relationships between signs and significance based on imagination. The capacity to create meanings that don't exist "in" reality: democracy, equality, human rights, the notion that humans are ends in themselves. These are imaginary constructions, but because we share them collectively, they enable coordination impossible for other species.

The Dynamics of Meaning-making

Meanings compete on multiple dimensions simultaneously:

Infinity-alignment: How well does the meaning acknowledge reality's infinite, indeterminate nature? Because reality is constantly changing and interconnected without final form, meanings that work must be structured for openness and revision rather than claiming finality. When people act on infinity-aligned meanings, reality tends to confirm them over time - not because they discovered the ultimate truth but because they can adapt when contradictions arise. Animism couldn't ultimately compete with scientific understanding because science generates practices that work better at predicting reality and can revise when predictions fail. Science is infinity-aligned. The problem comes when science is treated as transcendent truth rather than a revisable model.

Social power: How much force can enforce this meaning? Institutions, violence, economic control, cultural dominance can sustain meanings even when they contradict reality. Racial hierarchies persisted for centuries not because they reflected reality but because those with power could enforce them.

Psychological appeal: How simple, comforting, or identity-affirming is this meaning? Meanings offering total explanations, clear enemies, and strong belonging can persist even against both reality and institutional opposition. They provide certainty when infinity feels overwhelming. Religion is the most common of these types of meanings.

Coordinating function: How well does this meaning enable people to work together? Money - pieces of paper or digital numbers with no intrinsic value - spread globally because it coordinated exchange more effectively than barter, enabling strangers to trade without trust.

These factors interact in complex ways. A meaning highly aligned with infinity but with little institutional power will eventually win because reality keeps proving it right - but it may take centuries and tremendous struggle. A meaning resistant to infinity but psychologically appealing can persist indefinitely in communities that value comfort over contradiction.

Meanings for a Life Worth Living

Humanity's greatest achievement is having institutionalized some of the most magnificent meaning-structures: democracy - the idea that collective self-governance is possible and worthwhile. Love as a practice worth building life around. The pursuit of happiness as a legitimate social goal, not just private indulgence. Human rights - the radical notion that all humans deserve dignity and protection.

These meanings don't exist "in" reality. They are arbitrary human constructions. And they work not despite being constructed but because of it. They are infinity-aligned - designed for openness rather than closure.

Democracy does not claim to be the ultimate form of government discovered in nature. It is explicitly designed for continued disagreement, change, and revision. When it stops working well, it contains mechanisms for reform.

Love does not promise cosmic completion. It is the practice of actively choosing connections with particular people while knowing all things change.

Human rights are not eternal laws written in the cosmos. They are designed protections we collectively maintain, interpret differently, and evolve over time.

The pursuit of happiness acknowledges multiple paths, subjective experience, and ongoing pursuit itself.

These meanings are humble about their status. They propose practices that remain open to the infinite rather than claiming to encompass all reality.

This does not mean these meanings spread without struggle. Democracy often arose after civil wars. Human rights were declared "universal" by those who simultaneously denied them to most of humanity. The virtue of infinity-aligned meanings is not that they transcend power struggles - they don't. The virtue is that their openness makes them contestable from within.

When the excluded fought for inclusion - women for suffrage, colonized peoples for independence, workers for rights - they could hold these meanings to their own stated principles. "You claim 'all people' but mean only free men can vote. Either change or admit it's not universal." That argument was possible precisely because these meanings' infinity-alignment made them vulnerable to their own contradictions.

This is humanity's virtue: we can institutionalize meanings that, bumpy and contested as they are, align to a meta-meaning: that life is worth living, humans should enjoy existence and human life is a gift worth exploring.

This is important to remark: the idea that human life is valuable, that happiness or love are social goals, have not always existed throughout history. They are in constant dispute with other types of meanings that have different values. And they are the meanings that we should cherish, enhance and keep finding practices that make them evolve.

The Trap of Western Philosophy

Western philosophy had a particular advantage in creating and promoting these meanings: its emphasis on the individual as locus of value. Democracy, individual rights, freely chosen love, self-defined happiness, even science - these all assume individual freedom is foundational. This is why these meanings became especially prominent in Western societies.

Yet this advantage concealed a problem. These achievements existed in tension with Western philosophy's other dominant commitments: the search for ultimate meaning - the belief there is a final answer, a finite reality encompassable through mind, science or revelation - and the conviction that personal identity is a fixed essence to be discovered, rather than something continuously created - as indeterminate as infinite reality itself.

This created a contradiction at the heart of Western modernity: we promoted infinity-aligned meanings in practice while remaining philosophically committed to finding transcendent meaning in theory. Democracy spread while claiming to be "natural law." Rights were declared "self-evident truths." Romantic love is the "destiny of star-crossed lovers". The practical success worked despite - or in tension with - the theoretical commitment to ultimate answers.

Eastern philosophy took a different path. Buddhist and Daoist traditions embraced a fluid conception of the self and actively rejected the idea of ultimate ends. This philosophical difference shaped which meanings each culture institutionalized and partially explains why the West seems to be in a more profound meaning crisis.

Why the Crisis Happened Now

For most of human history, communities created meanings in relative isolation. Geographic distance and limited communication kept the plurality of human meaning-making hidden. Your meaning-system could feel like the truth about reality because you rarely encountered fundamental alternatives.

Partial meanings worked magnificently at the scale of isolated communities - enabling coordination, transmitting knowledge, building civilizations. Infinity was always there, but it remained hidden behind practical limits of connection and representation.

But several structural trends made infinity undeniable:

Globalization generated physical connectivity across the planet. Most cultures had to accept that their space and time belonged to a unitary space and time shared by all humans. There is not one meaning of existence - there are hundreds of thousands in conflict and superposition.

Telecommunications created non-spatial connections. The smartphone especially created a video portal to a multiverse of human experience in the palm of our hands. Images transport us to infinite places, making everything emotionally recognizable. No longer distant stories - they are mirrors to infinite identities and cultures happening live.

Interconnected economies made material existence depend on global coordination that makes infinity undeniable daily. Everything we use, every transaction, is now made from millions of pieces or products made or consumed by billions of people all around the world.

Artificial intelligence revealed that even intelligence - humanity's supposed distinctive capacity - is reproducible and scalable by our own creations. The fear of obsolescence, job massive loss or a big disruption in social structure is permanently raised. The implications of the ability to have "infinite minds" is both appealing and frightening.

Pandemic, Climate crises and the return of global wars - The pandemic showed us the interconnection and the structural vulnerability of all human beings. It also manifested that something occurring in other parts of the world can change our history in a split second. The climate crisis, whether you believe has passed the turning point or not, has become a central theme in worldwide culture. Third, wars and global conflicts are back in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and even America. These three things have shaken to the core the existential security that humans had in the last 40 years.

These forces haven't changed reality - reality was always infinite. They've changed our capacity to pretend otherwise. The salvaguards that helped our ancestors avoid facing infinity collapsed. Infinity became undeniable and constant.

This created a fundamental collision: meaning-making, which worked perfectly at local scale with hidden infinity, now encounters infinity made visible and constant at global scale.

How do you create shared meaning when infinite alternatives are undeniable? How do you condense expectations when options are visibly unlimited? How do you construct a plausible story when all stories are simultaneously present and contested? How do you imagine an infinite future when existential threats seem so plausible?

The West's theoretical commitment to finding ultimate meaning collided with the practical impossibility of maintaining that illusion when infinity and meaninglessness became visible.

Crisis and End of The World Narratives

The result is the crisis of our time. Some of the more obvious symptoms are:

Epidemic anxiety and depression - the meaning-structure collapse manifests in our bodies and minds. Chronic anxiety. Depression at unprecedented rates. Pervasive dissatisfaction even amid material abundance. These are not just individual pathologies but collective symptoms of living in visible infinity without frameworks to navigate it. The constant overwhelm of options without anchoring meaning. The exhaustion of defending identity categories. The weight of apocalyptic futures. The inability to rest in any stable sense of self or purpose.

Tribal retreat - people reduce complexity by seeking asylum in communities of belonging, even at the cost of losing autonomy and detaching from reality. Rise of fascisms, populisms, fundamentalisms. The multiplication of identity categories into smaller boxes - political, sexual, ethnic, religious - as if these provide automatic totalizing meaning. We want a "cultural braille" to know with eyes closed who is in our team and who isn't. We define ourselves through the negation of the other.

Inability to imagine futures - it has become increasingly difficult to imagine a future or concrete meaning for our lives. When the world becomes infinitely ungraspable, when everything external seems threatening, when habitat appears destroyed, when life itself feels precarious - what meaning can existence have? The result is quietism, paralysis, or retreat to idealized pasts.

Given the atomization of actors seeking answers to this meaning crisis, an incessant torrent of competing dystopias, utopias and conspiracies flood public conversation. Some want to see capitalism collapse, others want to stop economic progress and return to nature, religions are gaining protagonism again, nationalisms, populism, fascism and even terrorism become appealing again for millions of people.

These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of a philosophical framework colliding with a reality it cannot accommodate.

The West faces a systemic trap: with current technological infrastructure and economic integration, you cannot create closed meaning-systems compatible with democratic-liberal values and globalization. The infrastructure that revealed infinity (and created the best living standard in the history of humankind) cannot be uninvented without civilizational collapse.

This leaves three exits:

Tribalization - retreat into identity/political/national clusters and abandon democratic-liberal values. This is starting to happen, but cannot accelerate because global living institutions still hold. The contradiction generates constant tension.

Authoritarian closure - maintain economic integration but impose political limits on information flow. China demonstrates this path is viable. With philosophical traditions accepting meaninglessness and meanings centered on collective harmony rather than individual freedom, China shows that authoritarian control works to ease the crisis - limiting information flow to manage the meaning crisis. This works as stable equilibrium but requires sacrificing individual freedom.

Philosophical transformation - embrace meaninglessness and redesign meanings consciously for an infinite reality.

Realigning with Infinity

Reality exists. It is infinite. It has no transcendent meaning - no cosmic purpose, no ultimate destination, no final form we must discover or achieve.

This absence of transcendent meaning is not a problem to solve. It is a condition to accept. And accepting it liberates us.

A philosophy for infinity starts accepting meaninglessness: because there is no transcendent meaning, we are responsible for the meanings we create. That responsibility is not a burden - it is freedom.

A philosophy for infinity is based on the only constant variable of reality: the infinite itself. It is open and completely indeterminate, permanently in motion. It has no a priori categories, only a posteriori categories, always in transition. Its "permanent center of gravity" is, paradoxically, acceptance of reality's indeterminacy. It embraces that change is the only certainty.

This is not nihilism. Nihilism believes that because there's no transcendent meaning, nothing matters. Meaninglessness recognizes that because there's no transcendent meaning, everything we build matters - not in a cosmic sense but in the only sense available: the quality of sentient experience we generate.

Understanding that meaning is human construction - that reality at its core is meaningless - is not bad news. It can be a powerful ally for continuing to build meaningful meanings, but consciously.

The meanings Western philosophy promotes - democracy, love, human rights, the pursuit of happiness - don't need transcendent justification. They work because they're structured to remain open to revision when practices and meanings decouple.

The solution is not to abandon these meanings but to embrace them more fully by acknowledging what they actually are: conscious designs for navigating an infinite reality.

This requires profound courage. Meaninglessness is looking into the abyss - recognizing there is no cosmic safety net, no ultimate purpose, no final validation - and choosing to build anyway. Not because building will be rewarded in a transcendent sense, but because we are finite beings in infinite reality and by building we can make the best of our time alive.

Meaninglessness as Practice

Meaninglessness is not passive acceptance of chaos. It is an active tool for reconnecting to infinity when finite thinking has trapped us.

When we treat meanings as transcendent truths, we close ourselves off from infinity. We declare: "Reality is THIS, not THAT."

When we embrace meaninglessness - when we remember meanings are constructions - we reconnect to infinity. We can see what practices actually generate, what structures actually enable, what meanings actually serve.

The practice has five movements:

Recognize meaninglessness - acknowledge that the meanings we operate within are human constructions, not cosmic truths. See them clearly for what they are.

Recognize infinity - understand that the current configuration of meanings is one among infinite possible configurations. Reality contains infinite other possibilities.

Recognize when meanings have decoupled from practices - when they're generating suffering, blocking coordination, creating closed systems that contradict their stated purposes.

Search past, present and imagination for new forms - explore the infinite world of human experience and creativity to find other meanings and practices worth living for. The work is not creating from nothing but searching the infinite for what already exists but remains undiscovered or using its power to create new ideas, meanings and practices.

Build and participate - engage in the messy process of meaning-change through struggle, organization, creative experimentation, building alternatives.

This is not a technique. Meaning-making is not a technique but an emergent human process. Meanings arise from practices, from struggles, from accidents, from creative play. Especially from openness to connecting with others and with the infinite spectrum of human experiences. We cannot stand outside and design them only rationally. But we can participate consciously in the contested, chaotic process of meaning-change when existing meanings have failed.

Humans Have Always Done This

Consider music. Music is meaningless in the sense that it has no transcendent cosmic purpose. Yet it is structural to virtuous society, to human flourishing, to joy itself.

Music is an excellent example of meaning-making as practice. It's not only rational but emotional - it enters your mind and body. Many of us say "I only like this kind of music." But that is a flagrant lie we tell ourselves to avoid the anxiety of infinite possibility.

At this moment, there is more music available that you would objectively enjoy than you could listen to in multiple lifetimes, and more is being created every day. Yet most people listen to a small rotation of familiar songs. Not because good new or old music that would fit them doesn't exist, but because we tend to close ourselves to known meanings and realities.

This is the pattern everywhere: reality already contains infinite possibilities for connection, coordination, and prosperity. The constraint is not supply but our habit of returning to what we already know. The meanings we operate within feel inevitable only because they're familiar.

Meaninglessness as practice means recognizing that the current configuration is not the only configuration. Reality contains infinite other possibilities - other connections, other meanings, other ways of coordinating that could serve better.

The same is true for art, for aesthetics, for forms of social organization we haven't tried, for ways of being human we haven't explored. The infinite already contains them. The work is searching and building consciously.

The liberation comes from recognizing: we have been designers all along. The meanings we've consciously designed with humility about their status - democracy, love, human rights, the pursuit of happiness - work better than meanings we've claimed to discover in the nature of things.

A Philosophy for Infinity

A philosophy for infinity and meaninglessness is the most life-affirming stance possible.

It says: because there is no cosmic purpose we must fulfill, we are free to design purposes worth fulfilling. Because there is no ultimate meaning we must discover, we are free to create meanings worth living by. Because reality is infinite, possibilities are infinite.

The most rebellious act against narratives of the end of the world is this: reconnect to infinity, recognize we are designers, and build with joy.

We have benchmarks. Democracy shows designed systems can work precisely because they admit they're designed. Love shows chosen connection without guaranteed permanence is more beautiful than promises of completion. Human rights show collective commitments we maintain together are more durable than natural laws we claim to discover.

We have nothing else to do but construct collective meanings that help us have better sentient experiences.

When meanings and practices decouple, when institutions fail, when the future feels blocked - meaninglessness reconnects us to infinity. We remember: the current configuration is not the only possible one. We can build again, differently, better.

This philosophy is itself a meaning-structure, a framework for navigation. It makes no claim to be an ultimate truth. It is consciously proposed. The test is not whether it's true in some transcendent sense but whether it works - whether it helps navigate the crisis we're experiencing, whether it opens possibilities that feel closed, whether it enables new paths to human prosperity.

A Philosophy for infinity is a reminder that even though life has no transcendent meaning is enough to make it worth living.