Abdulla, the architect, offers a pragmatic view: “I don’t think we can or should try to live exactly as our grandparents did. That’s not realistic or necessarily desirable. But we should understand what we’re choosing to keep and what we’re choosing to let go. Conscious evolution is different from unconscious erosion.”

Dr. Al-Mansoori agrees but adds nuance: “Every generation thinks they’re the last to truly understand tradition. Every generation worries the next one will lose it entirely. But cultures are more resilient than we think. They adapt. The question isn’t ‘Will Emirati culture survive?’ It will. The question is ‘What will Emirati culture become?'”

That question has no easy answer. But asking it is essential.

Revival, Not Just Display

So what’s the way forward? How do we honor heritage without embalming it? How do we preserve without fossilizing?

The answer isn’t to reject preservation efforts or tourist experiences or cultural institutions. Those have value. The answer is to complement display with practice.

Heritage lives not in museums alone, but in:

Daily language. Speaking Arabic (or any ancestral language) at home, not just in formal settings. Teaching children not just to understand it, but to think in it.

Embodied knowledge. Learning traditional crafts, cooking, music not as historical curiosities but as ongoing practices. Not to perform them, but to live them.

Community spaces. Creating and maintaining spaces where culture happens organically, not just when tourists are watching or cameras are rolling.

Functional tradition. Wearing traditional clothing because it’s comfortable and meaningful, not just because it’s photogenic. Practicing cultural rituals because they structure your life meaningfully, not just because they’re “heritage.”

Critical engagement. Understanding the why behind cultural practices, not just the what. Knowing the history, the context, the evolution. Being able to explain your culture, not just display it.

Sara, the third-culture kid, found her own path: “I started learning about Emirati poetry. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to understand how my ancestors thought about love, loss, identity. And suddenly, the language wasn’t just aesthetic. It was alive. It meant something.”

Rashed made a similar choice: “I started attending traditional majlis gatherings with my father and uncles. Just sitting, listening, participating. No phones. No performance. And I realized: this is culture. Not the sanitized version in heritage villages, but the messy, argumentative, funny, profound version that happens when people gather without an audience.”

These are small acts. They won’t reverse globalization or stop modernization. But they represent a different relationship to heritage: one of participation, not observation.

The Museum and the Living Room

Here’s my conclusion: We need both.

We need museums, cultural institutions, and preservation efforts. They matter. They create continuity. They educate. They protect what might otherwise be lost entirely.

But we also need living rooms where culture breathes without being watched. Kitchens where recipes are taught by feel, not measurement. Majlis gatherings where stories are told because they’re worth telling, not because they’re on the tourism itinerary.

We need the staged and the spontaneous. The curated and the chaotic. The exhibited and the experienced.

The danger is when the first replaces the second entirely. When heritage becomes something we visit rather than something we inhabit. When the museum is full and the living room is empty.

Because in the end, culture was never meant to be perfect. It was meant to be lived. Messy, evolving, argued over, cooked wrong sometimes, sung off-key, worn until it’s comfortable.

And perhaps the greatest act of preservation is not admiration from a distance.

It’s participation up close.

It’s speaking the language badly until you speak it well.

It’s wearing the clothes until they feel like yours, not a costume.

It’s cooking the food until you can do it without a recipe.

It’s showing up to the gathering even when it’s inconvenient.

It’s choosing to live the culture, not just display it.

Because heritage doesn’t die when we stop taking photos of it.

It dies when we stop living it.