When people come to me with missing pieces, I still consider them complete humans. Most people are puzzles, and so this question seems like it answered itself.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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I liken it to a human being missing the little finger on their left hand. They are still a complete human being, just missing a little pinky.
Are you asking to get answers about the philosophical question, or did you argue with her about it and you want to find out what the lemmynet thinks?
As others have mentioned, "complete" does not have to refer to the puzzle itself. It could refer to the effort.
On the other hand, her puzzle, her frame, her wall: she gets to decide.
Personally, I'd want to craft replacement pieces and draw in the missing parts of the picture. Or maybe paint them gold like Kintsugi. That way the puzzle can be "complete" while still acknowledging the history of the puzzle.
I love the kintsugi solution, I think that would be really nice
Who cares? If it matters to her, she's right. If it matters to you... Why? And what are you gonna do about it?
This.
Both sides technically have a point to argue but if they like the puzzle so much to hang it on the wall you win nothing with arguing. Just enjoy the win.
Fun fact most puzzle makers use the same jigsaw patterns to make the actual pieces. You can mix and match puzzles to make some beautiful art. https://mymodernmet.com/montage-puzzle-art-tim-klein/
I like to build puzzles except for the last piece, just to prove to myself that finishing most tasks is a societal pressure, not an existential one.
Your very existence makes me sweat behind the knees
for me… it would be incredibly difficult to intentionally not finish the puzzle. i have bought secondhand puzzles in the past and they have had missing pieces, and i accepted the task as complete because i did. it have the remaining pieces. *that* felt fine.
but deciding not to complete the puzzle if i had all of the pieces? that feels like it would be very difficult.
and i can’t quite put my finger on why. why does finishing the puzzle bring satisfaction? what is it about that specific action? is it because it is culmination? if it’s because of the finality of it, the ‘it is finished,’ does that mean that the rest of the activity had less value? or that the only value it had was as part of an effort which was being built upon towards the summit of the last piece’s placement?
this person argues that finishing tasks is a social expectation, and i can agree with them there at least. a large part of the desire to finish things is in the ‘proving that it can be done and that [i] am capable of doing this thing and thus worthy of esteem.’
so is that it? is that why i would have a hard time not finishing the puzzle??
maybe it is because i am reflecting internally the external values i was raised with and am surrounded by? reifying structures around me?
or maybe it is just that it would feel disrespectful to not finish it? that the puzzle ‘deserves’ finishing?
i finished many puzzles with missing pieces, and for each of them i fabricated the missing pieces- usually from cardboard and pens, or from a piece of the box. i did it mostly because the hole would distract from the art. the lack of pieces didn’t bother me, because i was letting that be a meditative practice. ‘this is imperfect, but it exists and still brings joy.’
but could i bring myself to *cause* that imperfection, when the actual ‘proper’ completion would actually be possible? hmmm. 🤔
there’s a relation to disability here that i am not clever enough to elucidate unfortunately. it is just outside of my grasp. i’ll have to sit with it for a while.
probably my brain won’t maintain this shape long enough for me to be able to. but that’s a puzzle missing a piece out of the box, so i won’t mourn it. i knew what we were when i started this train of thought.
ah. that’s part of it, i think. emergence of disability here being the discovery of one’s self ‘lacking a piece,’ when the expectation was that all pieces would be there at the outset. that is why there is a sadness.
so if i were to sit here with a complete puzzle, considering it *not* as a complete puzzle but as one which was never destined *to* be completed- thinking of it as one that was *created* to be 99%-ed and have its final piece set aside, i think i could make peace with it.
bizarre train of thought. if you bought a mug and then shattered it, the normal course of action would be to be frustrated or sad. because mugs are ‘meant’ to be drunk from. but if the mug was created and destined not to be drunk from but to be broken? different reaction. i imagine there would be satisfaction and a sense of completion when it shatters.
so what the hell determines the actual destiny of a thing? the actual purpose?
i guess that digs to something deeper still, right? how meaning is created and what meaning even fucking is. blah.
All very interesting thoughts, I went through basically that whole conflict myself the first time I decided to not finish a puzzle.
Here’s how I look at it: a puzzle is fundamentally a challenge to see if you can solve it. (Maybe people will disagree with me on that, but in my mind, that’s what it is.) So as soon as I have finished enough of it that I can say “Yep, I’ve solved it. Only trivial moves are left. Even a baby could finish this puzzle.” it no longer is a puzzle to me. I’ve proven that I can do it, and that is the satisfying part to me.
If someone else has a different goal for puzzles (eg. they want to view the unblemished art) then maybe that line of thinking doesn’t really follow. As with all games, you can decide how to play - do whatever brings you the most satisfaction.
That actually brings me to another point. There is immense social pressure in games to play the games the “right” way. However, there is no wrong way to enjoy your recreation time (as long as you are not harming someone of course). Rule books are a suggestion, not a fact of life. Heck, there are more house rules in Monopoly than there are real rules.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, your line of thought was very interesting to me, thank you for sharing!
Thank you sincerely for the comment you posted initially! Not much these days causes the gears in my brain to stutter and seize and then restart the way the words you posted did. It’s also fairly rare that my brain holds shape long enough for me to get to chase down a thought the way I did. It was a real treat.
And please don’t apologize for the rant! Seeing your understanding and musings about this is fascinating too. You are appreciated all around.
Be well, internet stranger! Until never, maybe. :) May your life bring you satisfaction.
I can think of two arguments for why some might think it's incomplete.
- It is physically missing pieces.
If you painted something and were really proud of it but there was an accident that ripped 3/1000ths 0.03% of the painting off, would that stop you from hanging it up? Maybe some people would, but I think most people would still hang it up if they really liked it.
- She didn't perform the action of putting all 1000 pieces into the puzzle.
This is more of a "does she deserve the right to say she completed a puzzle without every piece?". There's definitely a line here: if someone just put the edge pieces together and said they had completed it, I would disagree, but honestly, is there any possible way that if you gave her those last three pieces she wouldn't immediately know what to do with them?
It's complete and she earned it.
I tend to think in « how much time did she invest in it » so yeah it’s complete
Like the Puzzle Project is complete, even if the puzzle lacks 3 of the pieces?
I come from art and a project is never really complete. Sometimes you have to let go and affirm that it is complete even if it lacks 3 pieces
Another example is sometimes when an artist passes away and you get to hear some unreleased songs. They are technically complete, but they didn't quite consider them ready and finalized enough to let others hear it when they were around.
Applies to software too, although my specific example is probably closer to art. Hollow Knight silksong was released and a few items were cut to streamline the "completeness" at release, but there is a planned DLC that will bring in some of that content back in a more cohesive and complete package. To most people it is complete, but some fans might think it is not yet complete because they know about the cut content and subsequent planned release.
It is a very subjective opinion.
She completed a harder puzzle than the original. If she says it's complete, it's complete. And it's now a much more interesting art piece than if it had all the pieces.
If she's used all the pieces and solved enough to reverse engineer the shape of all the missing pieces, then it is fully solved. If the missing pieces cannot be individually identified due to shared edges, then it is still solved, but is no longer a 1000 piece puzzle and she should only claim to have solved the 999 or 998 piece subpuzzle.
No.
You're done with it. It's finished.
But it's not complete.
She finished an incomplete puzzle. If that makes any sense.
It's a near miss.
Make the missing pieces. Various ways to do that, from hand drawing it in if you're good or the picture there is simple. Do a reverse search to find the puzzle box photo or the original image it came from and use that. AI, if you're not against that, could probably fill in that pretty well. Or just leave it, chances are depending where the pieces are most people may not even notice.
It's a completed piece of art or a completed task within the current capacity, but as a puzzle I consider it incomplete. She could still miraculously get those missing pieces and then the puzzle would be "more completed" in the same unit of measurement, which in my opinion just means that it isn't complete now. Although, that raises the question if a puzzle with a few damaged pieces is complete... I hope the pieces remain missing. That's a fantastic decoration idea!
I dig this question. I have a similar problem in my personal task management where I differentiate between efforts invested in general and efforts invested into completed tasks only. Since those are just solo projects, I don't invest a lot of time into requirements measurement and the output of a task is rarely what I had in mind. Looking back my judgements on what is completed are very inconsistent and the numbers are rather meaningless :/