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“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.” -The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath constructs this beautiful metaphor of life as a fig tree branching out in many directions offering a different fruit of possibility on each end and in front of it places her young protagonist Esther, who is paralyzed by the prospect of life after college.

Which fruit to pluck and which to leave forever untasted? That is the question we must all eventually answer.

Past generations were limited in their choices by geography, family responsibilities, class, gender, race, etc but today we are less restricted in these ways and therefore considerably more free.

Ironically, there is a major downsize to this freedom. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said “we are doomed to be free”that is, because we are solely responsible for giving our world purpose and meaning we bear the monstrous responsibility of being solely accountable for the life we ultimately lead.

Like the rest of us, Esther must make this collosal decision without a single guide or “life hack”. She is aware that to choose one of the many figs the tree offers, to choose a single path in life, means tragically having to give up on all the rest.

And yet, failing to choose altogether would be significantly worse since it would mean allowing all the figs to rot and fall to the ground un-lived. So she stands there, immobile, starving yet unable to choose which to bite into for fear of getting it wrong. Her life at a standstill.

I once watched a great TED talk from which I concluded that we are considerably less satisfied with our choices when we have the option to change our mind, and in fact that is exactly the kind of world we live in: one in which we have seemingly unlimited possibilities and freedom to choose with the option to exchange that choice at any time.

Hence we are often dissatisfied with our lot. So, amidst this overwhelming freedom, how are we to know which is, as Sartre refers to it, our authentic life–the one that is shaped after our own character and not outside pressures?

In order to answer this we must of course first respond to the question of what exactly is our ‘true’ character and this of course, as Sartre admits, is a question that will inevitably always remain ambiguous for us since identity is ever-evolving.

It seems then that as millennials faced with this frightening amount of freedom we must think of our life not as a single fig-choice we must live with but as a never ending creative process where fulfillment is never ‘arrived’ at but is always there in the play of continuously shaping our own reality.