The age of the sequel is over. Now it’s the age of the sequel to the sequel. Also the prequel, the reboot, the reunion, the revival, the remake, the spinoff and the stand-alone franchise-adjacent film. Canceled television shows are reinstated. Killed-off characters are resuscitated. Movies do not begin and end so much as they loiter onscreen. And social media is built for infinite scrolling. Nothing ends anymore, and it’s driving me insane.

No property may rest: Not “Jersey Shore,” not “Twins,” not “Mr. Mom.” The series finales of “Roseanne,” “Murphy Brown” and “Will & Grace” were not finales after all. The speed with which stories are expanding is beginning to outpace our capacity for language. The term “sequel” is insufficient to describe this summer’s conspicuously titled “Avengers: Infinity War,” an extension of 18 previous Marvel Cinematic Universe movies which in turn, fed into the fifth season of a television show, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Recently the man who spun the “Despicable Me” Minions off into their own franchise threatened a “reboot” of “Shrek,” but featuring the same characters and the same cast: a ghastly re-enactment of blockbusters past. Meanwhile, on smaller screens, social media has given rise to self-perpetuating content machines.

Didn’t endings used to mean something? They imbued everything that came before them with significance, and then they gave us the space to reflect on it all. More than that: They made us feel alive. The story ended, but we did not. This had been true at least since the novel supplanted the oral tradition. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin wrote that the novelist “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis.’” He continued, “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” We needed stories to end so we could make sense of them. We needed characters to die so we could make sense of ourselves.