Living the Unfinished

Photo: Pinterest

NOTHING REMAINS DEFINITIVE ANYMORE, NOTHING LASTS LONG ENOUGH TO BE CALLED "COMPLETE".

Not the house, not the job, not the relationship, and often not even the self.

What once was a transitional category, temporary, has become the default mode of existence in many parts of the contemporary world. In cities and rural peripheries alike, the unfinished is no longer a problem to be solved; it is the background condition of life. And out of this condition, a new cultural logic has emerged, one that does not deny suspension, but inhabits it.

Look at the skylines of post-industrial metropolises. Buildings frozen at mid-construction. Façades half-dressed in scaffolding. Neighborhoods with incomplete public spaces that locals nonetheless appropriate for daily life.

These are not ruins; they are works-in-progress with no promised conclusion. They are the material grounds of a culture that lives between rather than before or after.

This spatial suspension corresponds to something deeper: the way people experience their own lives. When housing is short-term, every address is provisional. When employment contracts are rolling or gig-based, every month is a negotiation. Relationships are entered without a future horizon. In such contexts, the very idea of completion ceases to function as a reliable anchor.

The Canadian sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his writings on liquid modernity, described contemporary life as characterized by mobility and impermanence rather than stability. But what if impermanence is not just a structural condition, but a cultural grammar, a set of tacit rules that people live more than interpret?

In these suspended conditions, culture does not collapse; it adapts. And this adaptation shows up first in the most mundane places:

how apartments are furnished with an eye toward flexibility,

how public spaces are used without expecting completion,

how social ties are maintained without long-term guarantees,

In such worlds, the pressure to finalize, to finish the job, to settle down, to make a home, isn’t replaced by stability. Instead, it transforms into a capacity to improvise, to extract meaning from the unfinished. Culture becomes less about narratives of progress and more about rhythms of continuity-in-flux.

In Beirut’s unfinished suburbs, for instance, people have turned skeletal towers into community spaces, markets, and stages for improvisational life. In parts of Madrid and Berlin, squatted buildings and pop-up housing have become sites of everyday intimacy and ritual precisely because they have no promised permanency. These are not temporary solutions; they are sustainable practices built in suspension.

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The anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of non-places, spaces that are not relational, historical, or concerned with identity, can help us here, but only up to a point. Airports, highways, and shopping malls are non-places because they resist personal attachment. What we are observing in communities around the world are places that invite attachment precisely because they resist closure.

Consider the lived experience of workers in gig economies. The contract ends; the platform replaces it. The working day is fragmentary; the next project is vaguely defined. Yet rather than perceiving this as breakdown, people develop practices of continuity: rituals of daily check-ins, shared narratives of uncertainty, humor as a coping mechanism. Culture here is not an escape from instability; it is its mode of endurance.

This shift from seeking resolution to inhabiting suspension changes how time itself is felt. Time is no longer a line with a beginning and an end. It becomes a texture, a weave of overlapping present moments, each dense with micro-practices of survival. People no longer ask when will it be over; they ask how do I remain present now?

This is not pessimism.

Nor is it triumphalism. It is something more subtle: the emergence of a temporal competence, a way of knowing how to live in conditions that were never meant to last, and yet do.

In such worlds, permanence becomes less meaningful not because it has disappeared, but because it is no longer the only currency of value. People cultivate disabilities of attention, what they can sustain, even without guarantees. Attention to a friend, a practice, a small garden on a balcony becomes an anchor.

In this sense, culture adapts not by constructing new narratives of completion, but by negotiating meaning in the unfinished.

And what survives this negotiation is not necessarily resolution, but presence in suspension.

This article is an original editorial analysis produced by [DIBA magazine].

Research and references are used for contextual accuracy.