When “Coherence” Becomes a Requirement: A Cultural-Semiotic Reading of the Life Project Scale

When “Coherence” Becomes a Requirement: A Cultural-Semiotic Reading of the Life Project Scale

Surreal imagery symbolizing the collapse of coherent life strategies. As a hand tries to force a "CAREER" piece into a perfect glass puzzle on a clinical grid, unpredictable glowing roots and flowers erupt, breaking the illusion of "STABILITY." A striking visualization of how organic life forces disrupt the pursuit of perfectionism and rigid life paths. Production Credits: Creative Direction & Concept: Nano Banana. Prompt Engineering & Narrative Structure: Developed via custom LLM (fine-tuned GPT-5.2 architecture). Visual Generation & Synthesis: Google Gemini AI Engine.

A critique of “coherent life plans” and what instability reveals about real human development.

Towards the end of 2025—visible as a symptom of a wider process—speaking about the future can feel like speaking softly in a noisy room. Technologies accelerate, the rules of work shift, public discourse hardens, and at the same time it becomes harder to hold on to a stable sense of “who I am” and “where I’m going”. In this climate, the word coherence sounds like a promise: the promise that life could be arranged, that the future could be told without fractures. Perhaps that is why the proposal by Coscioni and colleagues is so appealing. They introduce the Life Project Scale [Coscioni, V., Teixeira, M. A. P., Sacramento, A. M., & Paixão, M. P. (2024). Life Project Scale: A new measure to assess the coherence of the intended future. Current Psychology, 43, . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06407-5] as a way of assessing “the coherence of the intended future”, emphasising that in contexts marked by uncertainty, people seek unity, purpose, and a story that connects past, present, and future.

That intuition makes sense. Many lives need anchors. The critical point appears when coherence stops being one possible human resource—sometimes useful, sometimes desired—and starts operating as a silent ideal. In the article, coherence is translated into dimensions such as identification and involvement: the extent to which a person recognises that future as “mine” and feels engaged with it. This translation can be valuable as a research tool and as a prompt for dialogue. The risk emerges when that scientific move slips into a cultural demand: a “well-oriented” life becomes the life that is narratively unified, clear, sustained over time, and legible to institutions, policy frameworks, and public judgement.

At this point it helps to pause over an assumption that is often treated as self-evident: that human development should resolve towards stability, and that instability is a flaw to be corrected. That hierarchy—stability above instability—is not neutral; it belongs to a cultural philosophy of the “proper” life. Bergson (1977) proposed thinking of lived time as duration, where what has been lived continues to act within the present, and where novelty emerges because experience never repeats itself identically. This makes the cult of perfect coherence uncomfortable, because it suggests something both simple and demanding: human change is forged precisely in ambiguous zones, in moments when life has not yet become a finished story, when meaning is reorganising itself before it becomes explainable.

So the issue is not deciding whether coherence “works” or “doesn’t work”. The issue is noticing what disappears when coherence becomes the central criterion for evaluating life projects. Transformation often takes place through instability: grief, migration, separation, illness, economic crisis, discrimination, unexpected parenthood, political awakening, the loss of faith in what once felt secure. In those moments a person may not “identify” with a future or “engage” with it in a sustained way, because the future is being born as a question. And that “not-yet”—uncomfortable, open, uncertain—belongs to development rather than standing outside it.

From a cultural-semiotic perspective, a life project does not appear primarily as a plan that is organised; it appears as a process of meaning-making that moves. Valsiner (2014) analyses how experience is organised through signs loaded with value, forming hierarchies of meaning that orient what is possible: what counts as desirable, shameful, legitimate, attainable. In that view, what matters is not only “having a project”, but which signs are governing it. Coherence can sometimes indicate that a set of meanings has stabilised; it can also signal rigidity: a life becomes coherent because it no longer allows a re-ordering of what matters.

This becomes especially clear when sociocognitive approaches treat elements such as “taste” or “preference” as transparent individual choices. Saying “I like this” appears personal, even intimate. Yet taste rarely grows in isolation. It is shaped in families, schools, prestige imaginaries, class narratives, success aesthetics, algorithms that repeat what is desirable, and discourses that reward some futures while devaluing others. If a life project is built on tastes assumed to be purely “mine”, without asking about their cultural history, the intervention becomes lighter than it looks: it helps organise a narrative while leaving intact the symbolic machinery that produced that narrative.

A similar point applies to “self-knowledge” understood as identifying traits, interests, and goals. That self-knowledge can be useful, yet it deepens when it asks what meanings are at stake. Zittoun (2006) analyses how, in transitions, people draw on symbolic resources—stories, images, memories, cultural practices—that allow them to cross thresholds and sustain what has not yet taken shape. In that process, the self does not appear as a fixed essence; it reorganises itself in relation to symbols that open and close pathways. A life project, then, does not end with narrative coherence: it also involves the capacity to inhabit periods when the story does not yet exist, and to find resources so that something new can be imagined.

Boulanger (2021) helps name this in a concrete way: life organises itself while it is happening, even before we can tell it clearly. There are inner movements we live first and narrate later. Many decisions begin as small re-orientations: a conversation that shifts one’s compass, an experience of care that rearranges priorities, an injustice that makes a former path unbearable. When a life project is evaluated mainly through declared coherence, we risk valuing the final account more than the living movement that produced it.

The broader social question is not “how to achieve coherence”, but what kind of humanity we promote when coherence becomes a condition of legitimacy. In polarised societies, coherence is often confused with rectitude: changing one’s mind looks like inconsistency, doubt looks like weakness, exploration looks like immaturity. This moralisation impoverishes development, because it impoverishes the right to transform.

A viable response—with global implications—could begin by rehabilitating instability as a constitutive part of human growth. Stability sustains; instability transforms. Rather than pressuring people to “close” their life story quickly, we can build cultural conditions to inhabit ambiguity without punishment: education that teaches critical reading of the symbols of “success” and “failure”; media that portray non-linear trajectories without treating them as anomalies; policies that recognise caregiving, migration, restarting, and changing direction as part of life.

The Life Project Scale offers an instrument for studying how some people articulate their future through identification and engagement. A cultural-semiotic reading adds an indispensable layer: the capacity to re-hierarchise meanings when life changes. If we want to support life projects in this historical cycle of acceleration and uncertainty, it is worth holding on to a simple and demanding idea: human development needs cultural frameworks that support both the search for meaning and the right to change meaning.