Finitude As Love
Why embracing human limits can make our relationships, ethics, and systems more resilient
We tend to think of limits as problems to solve or personal flaws. Needing help, getting tired, or relying on others are often treated as signs of weakness or failure. But our limits are not mistakes. They are the conditions that make care, trust, and cooperation possible. Finitude is what gives love its shape.
When we call someone independent, we usually mean they can meet their needs without relying on others. That ideal runs deep in modern culture, yet no one actually lives that way. It has never been true! Every person depends on countless others—farmers, cleaners, drivers, doctors, teachers, friends, and strangers. We are maintained by systems of care and labor that we rarely acknowledge.
Recognizing finitude is not about glorifying weakness. It’s about being honest about how life actually works. Every living thing depends on others for energy, stability, and repair. This dependence isn’t a temporary inconvenience to overcome; it’s a constant feature of being alive. Seeing this clearly allows us to organize our lives around it.
Seeing finitude as the form of love means treating maintenance, not mastery, as the basis of ethics. Love is not an exceptional emotion separate from everyday life. It is the ongoing, real work of keeping one another alive and well. That work can be physical—feeding, cleaning, building—or emotional—listening, comforting, checking in. It is less about feeling than about attention; it accepts that people and systems need attention to survive.
This view stands against moral heroism. It doesn’t ask us to be perfect or endlessly strong. It asks us to remain responsive. Heroic ethics treats care as sacrifice, but maintenance ethics treats care as participation. Dependence is not something to be hidden or overcome; it is the way we belong to one another.
On Cookedness and the Fear of Needing Others
“We’re so fucking cooked.” It’s what people say when the news cycle cycles through another catastrophe—wildfires, economic collapse, rising fascism, another study confirming what we already knew about how bad things are going to get. It’s shorthand for resignation, a signal that the forces unraveling the world are too big to fight, that any attempt at collective resistance is too little, too late.
A society built on this understanding would not glorify self-sufficiency. It would reward and value those who sustain others and the systems that make life livable. It would value the nurse as much as the innovator, the caretaker as much as the architect. It would recognize that resilience and strength do not come from independence but from networks of mutual support.
When we stop seeing dependence as failure, love becomes simpler to see. To love someone is to accept that both of you have limits and to keep adjusting and functioning together. It’s not grand or dramatic, but steady, repetitive, and often unglamorous. But that constancy is what makes life stable and safe enough to continue.
Finitude, then, is not a burden or restriction on freedom. It is the structure that makes freedom possible. We can make choices, take risks, and grow precisely because others help maintain the ground beneath us and keep the world intact. To be finite is to live in relation—to rely on others and to be relied on in return.
Love, in this light, is not about overcoming limits but working within them. When we understand that, we stop chasing independence and start practicing belonging.
"Why Can’t They Just Die Already?"
“Things will improve once the old guard dies off.” At first, it sounds neat and tidy—a tempting vision of progress delivered by generational turnover. But lurking beneath that phrase is a darker logic: that our future depends not on solidarity or systemic design, but on simply waiting for older adults to disappear.