Liminal spaces and the emptiness of modern life
An exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the slow unraveling of late-stage capitalism.
We find ourselves lingering in thresholds that are not quite anywhere, not fully present, not entirely absent—waiting at the edges of airport terminals at three in the morning, drifting through deserted shopping malls after closing, scanning the hollow corridors of office complexes that have gone silent. These are the liminal spaces of our collective imagination, places that exist between purpose and purposelessness. The escalators hum, the fluorescent lights hiss, but no footsteps echo across the tiles. A sense of absence shrouds these realms, a loneliness so thick we can almost feel it pressing against our chests. And yet, in an ever-fragmenting culture where everything feels in flux, these places call to us like the spaces between seasons. Why?
There is a strange enchantment in these empty arenas of human transit and fleeting presence. We see them shared, re-shared, and exalted in digital galleries and online forums such as Reddit (the subreddit r/LiminalSpace has over 850k subscribers), pinned as a testament to some intangible longing. The concept of liminal spaces has become a cultural sensation: images of old arcades drowned in neon glow, school hallways with flickering lights, and vacant grocery stores that look as if everyone disappeared in the middle of some eternal night. Liminality drips with nostalgia.
It’s a door, half open, to our own lost childhoods, or maybe to the future we fear we will never have.
And behind all of this lingers a flicker of recognition: these images, these hauntingly empty transitional rooms, speak to the deep well of alienation that saturates our era. They reflect a longing for something simpler, a thirst for purpose in the desert of aimless consumption.
We must wonder why these indefinite spaces of flux and transition fascinate us so profoundly. Social science offers us a clue: the concept of “liminality”—coined by anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and expanded upon by Victor Turner—captures the “betwixt and between.” Rituals and rites of passage have always involved crossing thresholds, wherein the old self dissolves, making space for the not-yet-formed. A similar dynamic surfaces in these digital images of transitional architecture. We are drawn to that which is not a final destination but a conduit, a passage, a stepping stone. These in-between places come to symbolize an existential condition:
forever en route, never quite home, never fully at rest.
In the twilight of late-stage capitalism, we inhabit our own suspended world—a global liminal stage. Our lives, too, feel like those deserted hallways, bright lights shining on nothing but emptiness. Our desires and illusions swirl in the neon gloom, half-remembered, half-forgotten, feeding the quiet ache in our bones. We sense it but can’t name it: a longing for simpler times, for the intangible possibility that we may be part of something larger than ourselves.
Simpler times
Think of a memory: the school cafeteria, the pungent smell of cleaning solution, the square lunch tables, the faint hush of fluorescent lamps after the last student left. It was once noisy—bursting with cliques, gossip, the smell of cheap pizza, half-empty milk cartons scattered across tabletops. Yet after the crowds parted, an almost holy silence descended. In the stillness, you glimpsed the arrangement of chairs, the spilt crumbs on the floor, the ghost of your own presence lingering in corners.
Now imagine the broader social moment: we stand in the crosswinds of technology, speed, constant connectivity, and heightened isolation. Paradoxically, the more we talk to each other across screens, the less we hold real conversations.
We yearn, in quiet corners of our hearts, for the “simpler times” that memory constructs—childhood recast in warm pastel hues, unburdened by the suffocating demands of performance, productivity, and wage labor. This longing is nostalgia weaponized by capitalism itself, hammered into illusions for sale.
Retro fashions cycle in and out, vintage aesthetics dot our social feeds. So we buy, buy, buy remnants of a romanticized past, hoping to quell the gnawing emptiness inside. Recently I became obsessed—again—with Pokémon cards, for some reason.
But the emptiness remains: a hush in the center of the storm. In the haze of pandemic loneliness, the simplest forms of connection became mythologized. We realized that all along, we’d been sleepwalking through a churn of consumer cycles and digital illusions of community. The physical manifestations of these illusions? Liminal spaces—shopping malls with mannequins posing for no one, office lobbies without the daily rush, playgrounds where the echo of laughter forms an endless, incomplete echo. Perhaps it wasn’t just a virus that revealed these spiritual voids, but an entire system that prioritizes profit over genuine meaning.
The glow of empty billboards
Late-stage capitalism thrives on illusions of progress, the spectacle of commodity fetishism, the frenzied propulsion toward “growth.” Yet, in the last few decades, the cracks have widened: job insecurity, economic inequities, ecological devastation, and the mounting sense that the hamster wheel spins endlessly, but no one is steering.
Our society stands in a hallway between the illusions of permanent progress and the silent awareness that this path may lead nowhere. And we stand, watchers on the threshold, as late-stage capitalism quietly devours the meaning from our daily routines.
Why are liminal spaces so enthralling to us now, at this uncertain moment? Because they expose the illusion of utility. A hallway is not an endpoint; an escalator that runs on loops is a metaphor for consumer culture that never stops, even when no one is around to ascend or descend. The emptiness is not accidental—it’s the natural end state of a system that has commodified every last breath and left us with ghostly corridors and half-empty shells. This structural emptiness mocks the hustle, the performance, the 24/7 busyness that capitalism demands.
We hunger for a sense of belonging, a sturdy foundation on which to stand, but the system keeps pushing us through endless rotations of transitional states: temporary jobs, gig work, ephemeral personal brands, houses we can’t afford to buy, roles we enact but never truly embody. We become nomads shuffling from one precarious existence to another. The architecture around us—featureless chain stores, identical office parks, mass-produced apartment complexes—mirrors this “placelessness.” We drift from Starbucks to Starbucks, feeling both everywhere and nowhere.
Liminal images resonate because they highlight the fragility of modern life, the hollowness behind the mask of perpetual novelty. They ask, How did we get here? Are we just wandering from corridor to corridor, waiting for a door that leads somewhere real?
Yearning for home
Nostalgia arises in these spaces—an ache for the sense of purpose we once believed we had, or maybe never did. Memories of childhood come flooding back: the smell of a grandparent’s living room, the warmth of a hometown store, the unhurried pace of afternoons without demands. So much of that memory is fictional. Yet still we ache, we yearn.
Liminal spaces bring that yearning into sharper focus. There’s a sense that something precious has been lost, something intangible, something that cannot be purchased.
In a world saturated with digital screens and ephemeral interactions, the notion of “home” itself becomes slippery. Home, once a stable structure symbolizing security, is now transitory and fragile. We change apartments year to year. The lucky among us buy real estate as “assets,” not dwellings, in a mad scramble for profit. Our sense of belonging scatters across the clouds in the forms of data, social media presence, shifting circles of acquaintances, influencers, ephemeral communities, and fleeting cultural trends. We stand at the threshold of belonging, never quite crossing it.
Childhood, on the other hand, stands in memory as a symbol of innocence and authenticity—before the curtain of capital fell, before the demands of “the real world” swallowed us. Of course, these memories are edited by nostalgia. But that’s the point:
the romanticization of a simpler past reveals our dissatisfaction with an overcomplicated present.
We cling to images of pastel-colored school corridors because they feel more honest, more grounded, more tangible than the labyrinth of clickbait, video calls, and productivity tools that constitute daily life today.
Solitude as a commodity
And then there is the pandemic of loneliness, the creeping awareness that we are each a sealed bubble drifting through the void. We’ve become spectators of each other’s curated lives, scrolling passively through social feeds, each post a performance of presence in a swirling sea of absence. Our connections become transactional, measured in likes, engagement metrics, or networking benefits. We exist on the threshold of genuine connection, rarely crossing over.
Late-stage capitalism is adept at turning every human experience—love, heartbreak, creativity, even loneliness—into a commodity.
Work alone in your chic apartment with this new “productivity” tool. Fight your depression by subscribing to an app. Document your isolation so others can see how interesting, aesthetic, and vulnerable you can be.
Liminal spaces feed right into these curated narratives: we capture the emptiness in our cameras, layering it with filters, chasing the ephemeral sense that we’re capturing something profound. But maybe all we’re doing is reflecting the emptiness back into the mirror.
This compulsion to commodify can be traced to the fraying sense of purpose we collectively feel. We’re told to hustle, build personal brands, monetize every skill. Alienation, which once belonged to the domain of labor critique, now extends beyond the workplace. It seeps into our relationships, identities, and dreams. We float in a permanent state of liminality: never grounded, never truly free.
The mirror of liminality
That we embrace these liminal images so fervently could be read as an unconscious cry for introspection. They stand as metaphors for all that is not fulfilled in our current socio-economic environment. From a social science perspective, these spaces are not just empty corridors or deserted arcades. They are reflections of us, the onlookers, and the structural realities we face. The hush, the gloom, the swirling sense that something once lived there but now is gone. It’s a mirror, half-lit, unveiling our intangible heartbreak.
But is it purely heartbreak, or is there an undercurrent of hope? Liminality in anthropological terms is not just a state of confusion—it can also be a chance for transformation. During rites of passage, individuals enter a liminal stage before emerging with new roles, new identities, new insights.
Perhaps the collective fascination with these spaces is a sign that we crave a metamorphosis. We stand in a hallway, yes, but maybe on the other side lies a new approach to living.
A new approach that challenges the very premise of unending growth. One that recognizes the inherent value of community, cooperation, and sustainability. One that might embrace slow living over constant acceleration. Yet, in an era of late-stage capitalism, transformation requires a willingness to push back against the illusions that feed our alienation. It demands we question the systems that generate these ghostly corridors in the first place: the malls that exist to perpetuate consumption, the offices that replicate the logic of profit, the waiting rooms that hold our lives in stasis.
The presence of liminal imagery in internet subcultures can also be read as a subtle protest, a rejection of the glossy illusions of corporate aesthetics. These eerie photographs, creeping up like apparitions in our feeds, disrupt the carefully curated illusions of permanent progress and endless consumption. They remind us of the empty reality behind the façade.
In that sense, they become a form of anti-capitalist critique, a visual poem that recasts the age of relentless productivity as an endless hallway leading to nowhere.
By finding beauty in emptiness, we reclaim a kind of creative defiance. We dare to see the cracks in the system and wonder if there is life beyond the threshold. The pandemic of loneliness becomes a site of potential connection. The lack of purpose begs us to redefine meaning on our own terms. Nostalgia stirs in us the desire to build something more authentic than the illusions we have inherited. Perhaps the hush of deserted arcades can galvanize us to reimagine a future where community and mutual care outshine endless growth.
Well, perhaps.
Thank you for reading,
Antonio Melonio
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Thank you.
really fun article
🙏🙏 Cracks were opened during the early days of the pandemic, and collectively we had a rare glimpse of what lied beyond the bubble…but then we wasted it.