Microdosing Infinity

Like most people, the first time I realised just how small we are, I was a kid.

It’s a vivid memory, one that’s burnt into my brain. I must have been about ten years old, lying on my bed and staring up through the window at the night sky. Of course, living in Britain, the sky was mostly covered with clouds, but every so often the wind would sweep them aside, and I’d be treated to a clear, unobstructed view of the sky above.

The stars were fascinating. Those little pinpricks of light that lit up the otherwise dark abyss, forever looming above our heads. Lying there, looking up at the endless darkness, it hit me that each of those little lights was a star.

Of course, I knew – in the abstract sense – that they were stars, but it had never occurred to me that each of these tiny spots of light was (roughly) the size of our sun, and was millions (some of them billions) of miles away. I didn’t know the term “lightyear” back then, outside of that which refers to our friend Buzz, but I didn’t need to.

Lying on my bed, the sheer scale of the universe hit me like a tonne of bricks. We were on a relatively tiny rock in a relatively tiny galaxy that in itself was an equally tiny speck in a universe that – to the best of our knowledge – is infinitely expanding.

I’d had this feeling before.

Another time, as a child, I was blown away that the moon I could see when I stepped out into the back garden at night was the very same moon that my parents had looked at when they were my age. From there, the old mind began to extrapolate further and further back.

Damn, I’d think to myself, it’s the same moon that every single person to have ever lived has seen, too. And shit, people have even walked on that.

As a kid, I was flabbergasted by the idea that people had actually set foot on the moon. I still am to this day, if truth be told. It’s unbelievable. Truly, one of the highest achievements of the human race. Of course, it’s only one small step, but a giant leap, too.

So, with all this rattling around in my head, and the wind in my favour enough to part the clouds for another glimpse at the points of light in the sky, I marvelled at the size of the universe. In my head, I imagined one of those diagrams you see in space documentaries, the ones that show the Earth, then the size of the Sun next to that, then the size of some other planet or star. Until, ten minutes later, you have our home planet looking like a pea sat next to Buckingham Palace.

As I’ve grown older, the sense of awe at the size of the universe has, in some ways, been replaced by a sense of dread. Of impending doom. Of a feeling of complete and total insignificance in the face of something so unbelievably large.

To our best estimates – and by our, I of course mean scientists who are much smarter than I – we believe that the universe is infinite. That’s scary. As humans, we can’t quite fully grasp the concept of infinity. It doesn’t make sense in our heads. In a world where everything we deal with is finite, limited – like time, things we own, our own lives, and most everything else – forcing our brains to grapple with the concept of something without limit leaves us confused and a little scared.

Yet despite this, we’re drawn to it.

For the same reasons that people are drawn to horror films that depict ghosts or demons –perhaps because they, too, are fundamentally unknowable – we’re drawn to the infinite, precisely because it both scares and fascinates us in equal measure.

And infinity doesn’t just live in the sky.

Chess is a game that has been played for centuries. Created in India during the Gupta dynasty in the 6th Century, the game of chess has gone on to captivate people across the globe for over 1500 years. It’s estimated there are between 10¹¹¹ and 10¹²³ possible positions in a single game of chess. On the lower end of that estimate, it’s a one with one hundred and eleven zeroes. A trillion has only a measly twelve zeroes.

For all intents and purposes – and as far as our brains can comprehend – the game of chess has infinite possibilities. In fact, Claude Shannon, the American mathematician, is quoted as saying:

There are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.

The game of chess has had a hand in driving plenty of top-level players either to (or very close to) insanity since its creation. When confronted with the sheer number of possibilities that the game provides, players have fallen into extreme despair when attempting to push themselves to the rank of Grandmaster.

Professional chess players like Paul Morphy, Akiba Rubinstein, Bobby Fischer, and more have all found themselves severely unwell. Of course, we cannot claim that chess is 100% to blame, but it does seem awfully coincidental, does it not?

And still, the game captivates us. I include myself in that. There’s something so enticing about starting a match and having a virtually infinite set of possibilities before you. Invariably, I do end up starting every game with the London System, but the point still stands.

Chess isn’t the only place we’re confronted with the horror of the infinite. In fact, there are many aspects of our daily lives that plunge us into this surreal world.

Liminal horror is a good example of where we encounter the infinite on a regular basis.

We’ve all seen those images of the backrooms that show us a series of repeating, infinite corridors with no discernible way of determining the location. They’re just the right mix of familiar and strange.

Liminal horror works because it forces us to explore the infinite. We’re dropped into a world that’s totally indifferent to our presence, one that features repetition without resolution, scale without purpose, and time that never seems to advance in the way we’d expect.

At the tail end of 2025 – on Christmas Eve, to be specific – I found myself wandering through a quiet hospital at ten o’clock in the evening.

Strolling through the corridors, where every turn greets you with another walkway that looks identical to the one you just left, you get the intense feeling that this is exactly what the backrooms are all about. Walking and walking without seeming to make any progress, as though you’re trapped within a maze.

Its goal isn’t to harm or kill you. Rather, it wants to confuse you, to drive your mind beyond the point of recovery with an endless set of the same floors, walls, and posters telling you to wash your hands every thirty seconds.

A particular surge in growth for this genre happened during the COVID pandemic, when we found ourselves locked in our homes with not much to do except endlessly scrolling social media. The infinite nature of liminal horror matched our own experiences with being kept imprisoned in our houses; the familiar surroundings taking on a hint of surreality.

Outside of the internet, liminality plays a part in much more mainstream horror. Severance, for example, employs this theme to great effect. The unnaturally large office spaces, the whitewashed walls, and the maze-like nature of the Lumon Industries building are about as liminal as you can get. Movies like Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining also play on this unsettling form of horror.

We could even countenance the idea that social media platforms play upon the concept of infinity. As we find ourselves scrolling for hours and hours on Instagram or TikTok, we’re shown an infinite series of posts. We think just one more, each time hoping to find the metaphorical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The pot of gold never comes, and we’re trapped in a loop without end, scrolling and scrolling until some voice in the back of our heads tells us to stop.

We know, deep down, that things shouldn’t be infinite. We make sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves, and stories should always end.

Yet, even still, the concept of infinity still intrigues and draws us in, intriguing and confusing in equal measure. Instead of confronting infinity in its entirety, we dip our toes in just enough to remind us that there are things out there beyond our comprehension.

We microdose infinity.