The False Idea of the “Shared Project”
There exists a quietly dominant assumption in modern society: that a couple only shares a real project if they take on debt together—buying a house on credit, repaying loans, and eventually raising children who themselves become the continuation of that financial and biological cycle.
Outside this structure, many assume that a couple has no meaningful undertaking. Without mortgages, without repayment schedules, without offspring to absorb resources and attention, their life is perceived as somehow empty, unserious, incomplete.
This is a remarkable reduction of the human imagination.
It presumes that projects are inseparable from liabilities. That the only legitimate form of shared direction is one anchored in financial obligation. The house on credit becomes the symbol of purpose; the repayment plan replaces intention; the child becomes the proof that a couple is engaged in something meaningful.
Yet this definition is extraordinarily narrow.
A project, in its original sense, is any structured undertaking aimed at creating value, building something, or shaping a future. Historically, couples and partnerships have shared projects that had nothing to do with debt or reproduction: workshops, farms, intellectual enterprises, artistic collaborations, commercial ventures, scientific pursuits.
Two individuals may build a small business. They may invest in material assets. They may construct a home without borrowing. They may develop creative work, intellectual production, or parallel professional activities that gradually accumulate value. They may lead a lifestyle oriented toward creation rather than consumption, toward the formation of capital—material, intellectual, or cultural.
These are projects in the fullest sense of the word.
And yet contemporary society often fails to recognize them as such.
Instead, a peculiar fixation dominates: the notion that marriage and children constitute the ultimate and almost exclusive form of shared endeavor. If this pattern is absent, observers assume the absence of purpose. A couple without offspring is frequently treated as though it were simply passing time rather than constructing a life.
This assumption reveals something troubling about the state of collective thought. It reflects not abundance of imagination but its impoverishment.
The modern economic order encourages this reduction. Mortgage systems, consumer credit, and demographic anxieties all converge to elevate one model of life above others. The household becomes a stable unit of consumption and repayment. The narrative of the “shared project” conveniently aligns with the needs of financial institutions and demographic policy.
But the human horizon cannot be reduced to mortgage schedules and reproductive expectations.
A life together can contain many projects. Creation, experimentation, intellectual work, entrepreneurship, artistic production, the careful building of assets or ideas—these pursuits demand discipline, imagination, and long-term commitment. They require as much cooperation, if not more, than the standardized pattern of debt-financed domesticity.
When society loses the ability to recognize such undertakings as legitimate projects, it enters what might be called a night of the mind: a state in which the possibilities of life are reduced to a few repetitive formulas.
The tragedy of this reduction is not merely personal. It diminishes the diversity of ways in which human beings can contribute to the world.
A couple does not need to replicate a template in order to share purpose. Two individuals may create, build, think, invest, and develop endeavors that extend far beyond the narrow script that contemporary culture prescribes.
To assume otherwise is not realism.
It is simply a failure of imagination.
—
Olivia