It always feels impossible until it’s done.

Hobbies are inconceivably intriguing to me. You might like reading or sports, but for me, it’s video games. I can spend hours sitting in the same chair and position, all to just achieve a simple goal; however, recently I’ve found that the tasks I take on are unsolvable or infinitely long.

One of them is my shiny hunt for the legendary Pokémon: Giratina

It’s not even that the shiny Pokémon is better than the non-shiny variant. In fact, a shiny Pokémon is just a palette swap compared to the normal version

The process of shiny hunting is long and tedious due to the fact that in the game I’m hunting in, the chance of finding one is 1/8192. See how this might feel tedious?

It gets worse. To attempt to find a single shiny Giratina, you must get past all the main menus, activate the eon flute, and then fly into a portal.

That is your only chance to find it, and if you don’t, you soft reset the game and try again. Don’t worry, it only takes a minimum of 40 seconds per attempt. Maybe I have done this process a low number of times considering the chances, but still, I’ve soft reset at least 500 times—or the equivalent of five and a half hours.

All of this for the chance of success, but to no avail. I’ve put in over five hours of work for no payout in sight, but I press on anyway. Really, it’s a test of patience, but it’s not the only one I’ve done.

One of the other tasks I took upon myself was something called “The Test of Patience” from the Minecraft modpack Create: Above and Beyond. This was a simple task. You place down a barrel, and inside of said barrel is another barrel, and inside of that barrel is yet another barrel; I think you see how this goes.

The barrels promise a clean end of reward and fame at the end of it, but I have yet to find it. I tried for too long at this barrel task. I barely slowed down through the whole process. Hours had gone by, thousands of barrels had been placed, but nothing.

Endless is a hard thought to imagine. Plastic lasts too long for us to see it gone, but we know it will break down. The world has been around for thousands of years, an undefined amount of time, but we know it will end.

We know we will end. The question of when we end is a tough one to answer too. After we pass on? When our name is said for the last time? When our bloodline dies out? Is our end with the Earth’s? Beyond that?

Infinity. It goes on and on, and I just don’t get it. The draw of infinity pulls with force akin to its name, and I can never escape it. Perhaps it is the unknown that draws me in or the hopes to find the end of the void.

But in endlessness’s end, I find nothing—no solace for my journey but rather the crushing reality of the infinite’s endless trail.