There’s a particular kind of ambition that feels less like drive and more like drowning. You want to write novels, but you also fantasise about corporate law, living the full Harvey Specter life. You’re majoring in computer science while dreaming of moving to a new city and becoming an entirely new person. At the same time, you’re thinking about opening a start-up, or maybe a non-profit, because you want to make a tangible societal impact.
It’s not that you lack direction. It’s that you want every direction at once. And the sheer magnitude of possibilities leaves you frozen, unable to choose even one, while everyone else seems to pick something and simply go with it.
In 1963, Sylvia Plath captured this exact paralysis in her novel The Bell Jar. The protagonist, Esther Greenwood, imagines her life branching out like a fig tree.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
If you’re a woman in your late teens or early twenties, this quote doesn’t feel like something you read; it feels like something that actually sees you.
This analogy has become a cultural phenomenon in recent years. Screenshotted, edited, and recycled into bios, captions, and social media posts, it’s turned into the unofficial life quote of every indecisive young adult having an existential crisis about their future.
And while the relatability is undeniable, here’s what nobody really asks: why do we relate to it so deeply? Why has a passage about a woman imagining her life as the branches of a fig tree become the defining metaphor for an entire generation of young women?
And more importantly, is our obsession with the fig tree actually helping us make choices, or is it just giving us prettier language to describe our paralysis?
The double standard we don’t name.
Here’s the obvious, though: Men experience indecision too, but they’re not screenshotting Sylvia Plath at 2 am and crying over how a woman decades ago perfectly depicted their existential crisis in a quote. And there’s a reason: Men and women aren’t navigating the same game when it comes to life choices.
Women are sold a particularly twisted version of ambition. We’re told we can have it all: the career, the family, the passion projects, the perfectly curated life. We’re also told every single choice we make permanently defines us.
Pick your career over motherhood, and you’re selfish. Prioritise family over ambition, and you’ve wasted your potential. Want both? Good luck, and also, why are you so stressed? Women are supposed to be the light and joy of the family.
Men get to try things. They get to pivot, explore, and ‘find themselves’ well into their thirties and forties. A woman does the same, and suddenly everyone has opinions about her biological clock, her career trajectory, and her responsibility to her potential. For men, choices are exploratory. For women, they’re permanent.
And then there’s the damn timeline: Women are handed this ticking timer the minute they enter their 20’s. Career or motherhood? Decide fast. Want to focus on your career first? Hope you’re cool with everyone reminding you about fertility. Men can defer these decisions indefinitely: have kids at 45, switch careers at 50, start over whenever. Women get a decade, maybe two if we’re lucky, to figure out our entire lives before we’re told it’s too late.
The ‘wasted potential’ narrative hits women differently, too. If you’re smart and become a stay-at-home parent, you wasted your education. If you’re creative but take a corporate job, you sold out. If you focus on your career and don’t have kids, you miss out on what really matters. Every path comes with a built-in accusation of failure.
The fig tree resonates because it perfectly captures what it feels like to be told you’re free to choose anything while simultaneously being reminded that every choice is permanent, consequential, and potentially wrong. It’s not indecision, it’s decision-making under impossible conditions. And we’ve mistaken that systemic pressure for a personal flaw.
When your feed became your fig tree.
The fig tree is already a gendered nightmare, and then you add in the social media equation, and suddenly you feel like absolutely demolishing those damn figs.
Yes, the fig tree in 1963 was about looking at your own options and going into a melancholic spiral because you have no choice of direction, and you want to have everything. But in 2026? It’s more about doomscrolling and taking a look at perfectly curated versions of people’s lives, watching your high school classmate’s seemingly ‘perfect’ relationship, your college classmate’s LinkedIn post, and some influencer’s ‘I quit my corporate job to follow my dreams’ thread, all while you’re still trying to figure out what you want from your life.
We’re not paralysed by our own choices anymore. It’s not even your tree anymore. It’s everyone else’s, and you’re just the audience, watching their highlight reels while your own life feels like a rough draft that nobody asked to see.
But, here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: we’ve romanticised the hell out of this metaphor. We don’t quote the fig tree because it inspires us to make choices. We quote it because it makes our indecision sound profound instead of just indecisive.
The myth of the perfect choice.
But here’s the uncomfortable question we’re all avoiding, the one that cuts through both the gendered pressure and the social media spiral: what if there is no perfect fig?
What if the entire premise is flawed? We’re sitting under this metaphorical tree, agonising over which future to choose, operating under the assumption that ONE of these options is correct and all the others are wrong. That if we just think hard enough, analyse long enough, we’ll figure out which fig is The One, the ‘perfect’ fig, the ‘perfect’ path, and our whole life will click into place.
But that’s not how life works. That’s never been how life works.
The figs aren’t permanent. That’s the part we keep forgetting. You can pick one, realise it sucks, and pick a different one. You can change your degree. Switch careers. Move to a new city and start over.
People do it all the time.
The tree doesn’t stop growing. New options appear. Old options come back around. Life isn’t a one-time choice that defines everything forever. And here’s the thing about ‘wasted potential’; it’s a scam. It’s a concept designed to keep us anxious, second-guessing, perpetually seeking.
So, maybe you’re not wasting your potential by choosing imperfectly. Maybe you’re wasting it by never choosing at all. By staying frozen, comparing yourself to everyone else, and posting about your crisis instead of actually making a move. Any direction is better than no direction.
The perfect choice is a myth. Every option has the ugly parts. Every path has downsides. You’re not going to find a path that gives you everything with no sacrifice. That’s not how it works. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can actually pick something and see what happens.
but not the way I used to.
I still think about the fig tree sometimes. But not the way I used to.
I used to see myself in it: the paralysis, the wanting everything, the ambition, the fear of choosing wrong. I’d read it to myself and cry when I was having a crisis about my degree or my future or my entire life trajectory. It felt profound. Like Sylvia Plath reached across decades to describe exactly what I was feeling.
But here’s what I’ve realised: Some paths will be left not taken and undiscovered by you. But new ones will grow. And maybe the point isn’t to pick the perfect one; maybe it’s just to pick one and see what happens. See where it takes you.
And maybe it’s time to stop performing your crisis on Instagram and start actually living through it. To realise that most choices aren’t as permanent as we’ve convinced ourselves they are.
You’re allowed to try something and hate it. You’re allowed to change directions. You’re allowed to waste a year or two or five figuring it out. The tree doesn’t stop growing just because you picked the unfavourable choice once.
Sylvia Plath described what it feels like to be paralysed by choice. She didn’t tell us to stay there. That part? That’s all of us.
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