Not a dumb question. There are lots of different levels of explanation for this. But at the deepest level, the answer is "because the universe has a beginning".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox

But there's still light from stars we can't see (with our eyes, at least) reaching us, so the fact that the universe has a beginning doesn't explain why there are so few that are visible. And that really just comes down to distance. Stuff is really far apart, and light gets dimmer the further away you are. The distance the earth orbits around the sun is too small to make a difference in what stars we see, but we do see different stars at different times of year because we can only see them at night, so the direction of stars we see is "away from the sun", which changes as we orbit. There are also stars you can only see in the Northern Hemisphere and vice versa.