words and photography by Besma
If you’re chronically online, or an avid reader, you may have heard about The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, more specifically about the fig tree analogy. In it, Esther Greenwood, the main character, imagines her future life as a fig tree, each fig representing a possible life: a husband, children, a successful career, travels, education, writing… She sits beneath the tree, unable to choose which fruit to reach for. Eventually, she watches them wrinkle, blacken, and fall to the ground.
People online have turned this passage into a collective confession. As James Baldwin once said, our suffering is a bridge. How comforting it is to find people experiencing the same thing as we do. This analogy has become a mirror for the anxiety of having too many dreams and not enough time, for the fear that choosing one life means betraying every other version of ourselves. So we find ourselves grieving, surrounded by all the futures we imagined, fading into oblivion before we have even begun to live them. If you reduce your existence to everything you could have been, you sentence yourself to never becoming what you can still be. I like to think that my fruits cannot rot, because I am the tree.
“I like to think that my fruits cannot rot, because I am the tree.”
For as long as I am alive, my dreams are alive too. They may change shape, they may take longer to grow or no longer look exactly as I imagined them at nine or even twenty-two. Dreams aren’t fixed fruits hanging just out of reach, destined to fall if I fail to grab them fast enough. I can choose a path without permanently closing every door behind me.
This obsession with the fig tree is not only a trend on social media but a reflection of our generation. The average young adult spends more than three hours a day online. Hours spent observing other people’s lives through carefully curated clips, depicting their morning routines, relationships, careers, gym sessions, friendships… We are shown how to become prettier, more productive, more interesting. We are taught how to romanticise our lives, how to become cool. The borders between personality and aesthetic are long gone.
We are given so many instructions for how to live that we forget to exist.
Instead of experiencing life, we simply consume it. We are curating Pinterest boards for the person we want to become instead of letting ourselves become that person through error, embarrassment, boredom and joy.
The internet has made us hyper-aware of possibility. Someone is getting married. Someone is running a marathon. Someone is publishing a novel. Someone is travelling the world. Someone is always doing the thing we think we should be doing.
And then we wonder: If I become a teacher, will I regret not becoming a writer? If I move abroad, will I miss the life I could have had here? If I settle down, will I regret not discovering the world? No wonder we feel like Esther beneath her fig tree. We have been given front-row seats to thousands of lives, and we are expected to compare our unedited reality with someone else’s best shot of their days.
“The internet costs us more than just time. It costs us presence: our capacity to listen, to experience, to discover.”
The lie is that all those lives are equally available, equally real.
They are not. A life is not valuable because it looks good from the outside. A life can look boring online and still be full — full of opportunities, slow moments, memories, failures, love. The internet only shows the finished painting, never the years of bad sketches.
The internet costs us more than just time. It costs us presence: our capacity to listen, to experience, to discover. When everything can be searched, ranked, reviewed, it becomes difficult to know what we genuinely want. Do I want this hobby, this degree, this destination, this relationship? Or do I want the version of myself that seems to come with it?
There is nothing shameful about wanting to be seen, but we should be careful not to lose ourselves somewhere between building a life and curating evidence that we have one.
You do not need to become perfectly curated before you are allowed to participate in your own life. The real plot is not choosing the perfect fig. The real plot is to live, and to just do it. Imperfectly, not aesthetically.
But simply honestly.
