In the Pursuit of Knowledge
I was in the middle of writing about general relativity when the counter caught my eye. The next piece would be the hundredth post on Valeon. A round number, a small milestone, but my mind grabbed it and ran. I found myself drifting away from curvature and geodesics and the behaviour of light in a gravitational field, and into something far more personal: what happens when I run out of things to say?
It wasn’t a fully formed thought at first, more like a background process that suddenly spiked CPU usage. One part of my mind started stockpiling potential topics, scrambling to hoard ideas like canned food before a storm. Another began mapping out research time, trying to carve out imaginary days where I would read and study and fill the tank. Beneath both of those was a quieter, more unsettling subroutine, the one that really caught my attention: what if there is a limit to what can be known? Not just for me, with my one finite life and my tired eyes, but in principle. Is there a boundary beyond which there is simply nothing left to learn?
As a child, I had a mantra I would quietly repeat to myself, a small sentence that held a vast ambition: “anything and everything there is to know, I must know it.” I did not have the language of epistemology, finitude, or information theory. I just had that stubborn line echoing in my head. It was both a vow and a confession. The vow: I will not turn away from the world; I will look, and listen, and try to understand. The confession: I already sensed, even then, that I was pushing against something much larger than me, that there was more “out there” than I could ever possibly hold. The mantra did not come from arrogance. It came from an aching awareness of my own smallness and a refusal to let that smallness become an excuse for indifference.
As I grew older, the naïve impossibility of that sentence became clearer. There are, after all, hard limits everywhere. A closed system of objects only has so many ways it can be arranged. Give me a box of fixed volume, filled with a fixed amount of matter and energy, and in theory there is a finite number of possible configurations. Given enough time, you could catalogue them all, like a cosmic sticker book. It is tempting to extend that intuition to knowledge itself and imagine that, at some level, everything that can be known is simply the list of all the ways atoms can be positioned in space. Under that view, my childhood vow was not just ambitious; it was absurd.
But the more I sit with this, the more that view feels too thin. Knowledge is not just an inventory of states. It lives in the relationships we perceive, the structures we recognise, the meanings we infer. You can hold the same physical configuration of ink on paper in your hands and see a shopping list, a poem, a confession, a prophecy, depending on the language and history you bring to it. The world offers patterns; knowledge is the ongoing act of learning to see them, to name them, to connect them to everything else we know. A closed system of matter can still give rise to an open horizon of meanings. The number of possible books that could be written about a finite universe is, in practice, unbounded.
There are at least two limits we have to hold in tension. The first is the limit of the world: what physics allows, what the cosmos contains, what can, even in principle, be the case. The second is the limit of the knower: the brevity of a human life, the narrow bandwidth of our senses, the constraints of our culture, language, and time. Even if the universe were finite in information, it would still be functionally infinite from the perspective of a single human being. You and I will die long before we have read even a meaningful fraction of the books already written, let alone the ones yet to be imagined. Long before we have understood even a sliver of the theories that will someday seem elementary to those who come after us.
This is where the anxiety around “running out of ideas” begins to show its true nature. It was never really about the finitude of knowledge. The fear was not that there would be nothing left to learn, but that there would be nothing left for me to say. That I would simply exhaust whatever small cache of originality I possessed and then spend the rest of my days rephrasing myself, rearranging old sentences like furniture in a room I can no longer afford to leave. In that light, my childhood mantra and my adult anxiety are two sides of the same coin. The child insisted, “anything and everything there is to know, I must know it.” The adult whispers, “what if I’ve already said everything I have in me to say?”
That fear rests on a certain illusion: the idea that ideas originate in isolation. In practice, thought rarely arises in a vacuum. It is a reaction, a response, a collision. You read something and it troubles you. You hear a story and it will not leave you alone. You witness an injustice, a kindness, a small absurdity in the middle of a dull day. Life knocks, and if you are paying attention, it stirs something in you that did not exist before. The stream of experience is continuous, and as long as it flows, there is always some new angle, some new combination of old elements, some new way that a question can appear. The world keeps speaking; the only real danger is that we stop listening.
We often imagine knowledge as a library where the goal is to eventually read every book on every shelf. That vision is comforting because it suggests completion. You work hard enough, long enough, and one day you will stand in the centre of your mind and feel that everything is in order. But a better metaphor might be an expanding city. Every time you build a new structure—a concept, a theory, a domain of expertise—you simultaneously create new streets, new intersections, new places that need lighting and maintenance and care. Understanding does not merely add answers; it multiplies questions.
When you first discover general relativity, for example, it feels as though a huge chunk of the universe has suddenly snapped into place. Gravity is no longer a mysterious force acting at a distance; it is the geometry of spacetime itself. Objects move along geodesics. Light bends. Time dilates. The equations are beautiful and, in their domain, startlingly precise. For a moment, you feel the intoxication of having grasped something fundamental. Yet almost immediately, the edges begin to fray. What happens at singularities? How does this fit with quantum mechanics? What is the true nature of dark energy, dark matter, the early universe? Each advance carves out new shadows. Every “Eureka” draws a new outline around what you still do not understand.
So is knowledge finite or infinite? From the standpoint of pure physics, there may well be hard ceilings—limits to how much information any region of space can physically store, horizons beyond which we can never observe. From the standpoint of a living, finite mind, those distinctions are almost academic. For all practical purposes, the horizon of what can be known is always beyond our reach. We are like climbers on a mountain whose summit recedes with each step, not because it is moving, but because every metre gained reveals a further ridge we could not previously see. My childhood vow collides here with reality: “anything and everything there is to know, I must know it” meets a world where even a lifetime is not enough to properly digest a single discipline.
At first glance, this can feel discouraging. Why bother, if you can never finish? Why write your hundredth post if there will be a hundred more you will never live to write, and a thousand others that someone else might express more elegantly, more rigorously, more convincingly? Why wrestle with the architecture of the cosmos if the final theory—if such a thing even exists—will always lie beyond your grasp? Somewhere in that discomfort lies an important shift: from knowledge as conquest to knowledge as relationship.
The pursuit of knowledge has never really been about completion. It is about orientation. Each thing you learn changes how you stand in the world, how you see yourself, how you interpret the actions of others, how you choose what matters and what does not. Knowledge is not just a catalogue of facts; it is a lived posture, a way of being-with-reality. You do not study general relativity merely to recite field equations; you study it to cultivate a sense of humility and wonder about the structure of existence, to feel in your bones that even something as simple as “falling” is, in fact, a conversation between you and the curvature of spacetime.
The same applies to more ordinary forms of knowing. Learning about history does not simply fill your head with dates and events; it changes how you understand your own era, how quickly things can shift, how fragile institutions are, how deeply human beings can both wound and redeem one another. Learning psychology does not merely equip you with jargon; it softens your judgments, sharpens your discernment, allows you to see that the stranger’s behaviour on the street or the colleague’s sudden withdrawal may be rooted in wounds you cannot see. In that sense, the child’s vow was not entirely misguided. “Anything and everything there is to know, I must know it” can be read less as an impossible demand for ownership and more as a commitment not to look away. Not from suffering, not from complexity, not from the parts of reality that do not flatter us.
Seen in this light, the “limit” that truly matters is not the edge of the universe’s information content, but the edge of your sincerity. How deeply are you willing to let what you learn actually change you? How far are you willing to carry the consequences of a truth you have glimpsed, even when it is inconvenient, even when it costs you something? There is a kind of pseudo-knowledge that endlessly accumulates data but never alters the knower. It expands horizontally but never deepens. The more important sense in which knowledge might be infinite is vertical, not horizontal: the same insight can be lived more deeply, more honestly, more courageously, again and again.
If I return now to the anxiety about running out of things to say, it looks different. Ironically, the more seriously you take your own finitude, the less that fear makes sense. You and I are not in danger of exhausting the universe’s supply of questions. We are in danger of ignoring them. We are not at risk of saying everything that can be said. We are at risk of saying nothing that truly matters to us, of turning away from the uncomfortable and the uncertain in favour of recycled opinions that cost us nothing. The child’s mantra wanted everything; the adult’s task is to choose something—and to give it the depth and honesty it deserves.
A hundred posts on Valeon is not a completion badge. It is a small marker on a much longer road, a reminder that the work of thinking and writing is not to conquer knowledge but to remain faithful to its call. To keep returning to the desk, to the page, to the conversation, even when you feel empty, and to discover that the emptiness itself contains questions worth exploring. To allow that strange background process—the one that worries about limits—to become instead a quiet companion, nudging you not towards hoarding ideas, but towards paying closer attention to the life already unfolding around you. Life will keep handing you puzzles: a passing remark from a stranger, a headline that will not leave your mind, a scientific paper that quietly overturns something you thought was settled. The stream does not stop.
If there is any consolation in all of this, it is that you will almost certainly die long before you have run out of things to write about. The constraint is not imagination but time. That fact can easily slip into despair if you let it. Or it can become a kind of grace, a sharp, clarifying mercy. Because if you cannot say everything, you must decide what you will say. You must choose which questions you will give your finite hours to, which mysteries you will sit with, which corners of the infinite mosaic you will help to colour in. You must let the impossibility embedded in “anything and everything there is to know, I must know it” push you, not towards frantic accumulation, but towards careful, deliberate attention.
The limit, then, is not a wall at the edge of knowledge, but the outline of a life. Within that outline, the work is simple and impossibly difficult: to keep learning, to keep refining, to keep speaking honestly from wherever you stand, knowing that the horizon will always be ahead of you. Knowledge may or may not be infinite in some abstract, cosmic sense. But meaning, it turns out, is made precisely here, in the tension between what we can never finish and the small, stubborn commitment to begin again anyway.
