We get a lot of questions about how things work at the French Experiment, and one of the common ones is about money. How do you handle paying for groceries? Or for unexpected expenses that naturally come up when you have an old house? How do you ensure it’s fair and equal?

Well, we think about fairness in a different way, I think. And we’re trying to think about money in a different way too.

We are trying to live as we wish the world were, rather than living as the world tends to be. This means that there are times when we have to redefine some common assumptions right from the beginning and replace them with new assumptions. One of the big ones has been about money, and we’re still trying to figure out how to think about it.

We decided at the beginning to rewrite the idea that money tends to buy you better things and more power. We don’t love that about the way the world works right now, and we didn’t want that to be woven into our collective home. We knew that those of us who were buying the place had very different access to resources and to hold a single standard would be unhelpful. So we decided the amount a person contributes here doesn’t have much to do with nicer rooms, more square footage, or having a greater say in the decisions we make collectively. Instead, we would piece together some new assumptions about money, looking to create a sense of fairness that was less about contributing the exact same amount and more about keeping things fair between us, watching for a sense of resentment arising, and talking that through.

So when it comes to groceries, we each pay when we go grocery shopping. We make no distinction about whether we’re buying a treat for ourselves or for someone else. If you have more money and or want to use your money to buy more expensive groceries (which in France often means better cheeses and wines), you can do that. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to. We might exclaim more passionately as we eat the expensive cheese, but we eat the cheaper stuff without complaint. And we check in with each other to be sure: Does it feel like we’re all contributing in this fair way? As long as the answer is Yes, there’s nothing more to be done here. And because each of us tends to be more fierce with our individual standards than the group’s standards, the answer has so far always been Yes.

But there are the bigger questions. When we finished our large renovation and realized that we needed to dig deeper into our pockets to pay for it, we needed to think about fairness again. Now we were asking each other to put in more money that didn’t seem to buy more of anything for the individual, really. How did we feel about each being able to use our new kitchen and other spaces equally, but paying for it unequally? What would make that feel fair and what would make it feel unfair?

We had to have deep conversations about what money meant to us, about how we thought about spending it in other parts of our lives. We had to talk openly about how much money we had and how we were sometimes ruled by fear and scarcity and sometimes we were guided by generosity and abundance. We had to expose our shadows about money to the light of one another’s gaze. And then, after we understood each other more deeply, each of us decided how much more to put in. Some folks put in very little, others quite a lot. What was clear, though, was that each of us made the sacrifice we could make. Our sense of fairness doesn’t come from the amount we offer but from the knowledge that we all are contributing as we can.

This is still a live issue for us, especially as the community expands. We’re running out of space for new folks to live in; the next handful of residents will need to bring enough money in with them to renovate a big barn. We are trying to balance what it means to be both practical and idealistic in this regard and to keep our hearts and minds on not only renovating bedrooms but also renovating old assumptions that tend to shape the way money works. I don’t know how it will unfold. What I know is that we will work hard for it to unfold intentionally rather than sleepwalking our way back to earlier assumptions about money that seem to operate in the rest of the world. This means it’ll be harder to figure out, there’ll be a lot of wrestling with demons publicly that most of us have tended to keep private, and we’ll make mistakes and need to back track.

But perhaps this is one of the wonderful things about the French Experiment. If you are trying to live the way you wish the world were in your condo in Manhattan or Paris or Sydney, you are just talking with yourself or perhaps those who live inside your family; your neighbours are unlikely to take part in those conversations. If you’re trying to reimagine the way you can live together in a collective, there’s so much that you have to unearth, and so much you have to reconsider. But therein lies the transformative nature of communities. They expose us to ourselves and allow us to examine and shift things we didn’t even know we believed. They allow us to change driving beliefs that should have lost their drivers license years ago. And they allow us to recreate, rewrite, reform in company so we don’t have to imagine a new world by ourselves. That seems like a radical form of fairness indeed.