the hunger to be everything

how to commit when you have too many options

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

When Sylvia wrote this in 1961, I don’t think she accounted for the infinite options that a 20 something old will get in the 21st century.

The modern version of the fig tree quote might look like this:

“I saw my life growing like a dense forest, with so many seeds of thoughts, trees growing everywhere. From the tip of every branch of every tree, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a remote job, my life becoming a carousel of co-working spaces in different cities and golden hour photos, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

One fig was a content creator, a million followers hanging on my voice, my face, my takes. Sponsorships and parasocial love.

One fig was the founder, equity vesting over four years, ping pong tables and existential dread, with the dream of an exit.

One fig was freezing my eggs, buying time. Maybe kids at 40. Maybe never. The choice preserved in liquid nitrogen.

One fig was the portfolio life, a little consulting, a little Substack, a little coaching, monetizing every corner of my mind until I couldn’t remember what I thought before I thought about what would sell.”

Unlike Sylvia, we don’t stand at the threshold of choosing. We want to become everything and we attempt at being everything.

We stretch ourselves across branches, one hand gripping the founder fig, one foot hooked around the creator fig, our teeth clenched around the stem of the lover, the traveler and the artist.

They said choice would taste like freedom, but not that it’s an addictive sweetness. One that rots the stomach, until even our gut-instincts lose their sense of direction.

We have started to suffer. But that suffering is not because of an abundance of options. We suffer because of lack of commitment.

I am exhausted. I am exhausted of orbiting around this word, “potential.” A daily flirtation with who I am not, what I don’t have and what I haven’t done. I just have lists of lists of things to get done. No matter how much I do, something is always a miss.

In 1961, you might have wondered if other women were choosing different figs, career, children, bohemian affair in Paris. But you couldn’t watch them do it in real time.

You couldn’t see the famous poet also being the mother also being the traveler also being the lover, documenting each identity in a grid of squares, making it look seamless. You couldn’t compare your single, half-eaten fig to someone else’s abundant harvest.

Now you can. Now you must.

Every morning, I wake up to evidence that someone has figured out the puzzle I haven’t. She has the startup and the sourdough and the relationship and the biceps and the book deal. He’s location-independent and present for his kids and building generational wealth and learning ceramics.

The math adds up somewhere, in someone else’s life, so why not mine?

The fig tree has become a spectator sport. We watch each other climb. We take notes.

I don’t want to write an essay that ends with a prescription. I don’t know the answer. I’m suspicious of anyone who does, because the hunger to be everything is real, and it’s not delusion, and some of the people who tell you to “just pick one thing” are selling you their one thing.

I wonder sometimes if Sylvia’s problem and our problem are the same problem with different symptoms.

She couldn’t choose because choosing meant loss. We can’t stop choosing because stopping means loss. Both are attempts to escape the same unbearable fact: we are finite.

We have one life. It will end. And no amount of optionality or optimization or pivoting will give us a second one.

I don’t want any more doors. I want to walk through one without looking back. Because that door opens to the home, I can actually live in.

Signing off
Akanksha