A nineteen-year-old USC freshman sits in her dorm room and is paralysed by an intense, insatiable desire of wanting to do everything, but she ends up doing nothing. She signs herself up for a calligraphy class, to which she never goes, she buys book after book, none of which she actually reads, she acquires crochet yarn and needles, and they sit unpackaged under her bed. And so she is despondent, in her multipotentialite mystery. She goes online to seek solace and is overwhelmed by a curated feed of content that is constantly telling her that she isn’t doing enough, that she’s behind, and that she’s missing out.

Today’s world is a digital one, where contemporary culture is digital culture, of which trends are the cornerstones. One such trend that took the internet by storm is novelist and poet Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor, which has been revived and fitted to context by Generation Z trend-setters and seekers on social media.

Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” follows protagonist Esther Greenwood, a young Boston undergraduate, and her descent into mental illness as she grapples with the limited roles available for women in the 1950s, contrasting societal expectations of marriage and motherhood with her own intellectual and career ambitions.

At the same time, this is not to invalidate the difficulty of transforming from a girl to a young woman in today’s society. College students today, much like Greenwood in “The Bell Jar,” experience choice paralysis as they try to come of age in ways that feel individually cathartic amid an oxidising job market. Rapid shifts from artificial intelligence disruption to vanishing entry-level roles force students to pick career paths that resist obsolescence.

The demographic that has taken most strongly to this trend is college students, as they sit at the cusp of transformation and coming of age, and hence find solace in Plath’s rhetoric of suffering.

In the book, Plath writes a metaphor in which Esther imagines herself at the fork of a fig tree, each branch bearing a fruit ripe with a different future. Paralysed by indecision, she sits there forever and starves as each fig rots, withers, and falls at her feet.

In 2023, Plath’s fig tree trend seized as a pop-culture sensation. Gen Z took to TikTok to grieve their ghost lives, spelling out each lost life they wish to have pursued on pictures of figs and posting them.

In early 2026, with the internet buzzing about the Chinese zodiac year of the fire horse bringing in action and ambition, the metaphor resurfaced online, although in a quieter, more embedded way. Recent examples include reels and shortform videos that say “don’t let your figs rot.” In fact, #Figtree and related tags had hundreds of thousands of videos and millions of views on TikTok and Instagram.

That said, social media seems to have misappropriated an analogy that originally protested against the binary choices women faced in the 1950s. Removed from the context of the novel, Plath’s fig tree excerpt oversimplifies “The Bell Jar” as a product of its time.

The analogy then becomes a form of aestheticised grief, turning the limitations of women in the 1950s into a modernised, polished, and shareable vibe in a society that more easily allows for women to pursue multiple career paths, without having to choose between domesticity and a demanding career if that is what they wish.

That said, the internal conflict that plagues that nineteen-year-old freshman daily is very much a common and real problem in today’s youth. It will hinder her, limit her in her desire to be limitless and divert her time and focus from honing skills necessary to survive the very demanding and specialised career culture of today.

USC students are faced with defining choices every day as they navigate their professional and personal identities. USC, as a private, legacy-conscious institution, trades on futurity with half a million alumni positioned as mentors, employers and gatekeepers of opportunity for current students.

The University teems with choices, but also with the pressure to make timely decisions. The pace of change in the professional world today has forced college students into a temporal whiplash, making Plath’s tree emotional shorthand for those trying to grow in a world where the branches of each fig tree multiply, divide, and snap at warp speed.

The reality is that today’s automated labor market demands niche specialisation, which puts pressure on individuals to be both multifaceted and highly trained. Students like Pola Malkowska, a freshman majoring in communication, who are interested in starkly different subject areas, bring in a fresh perspective of multiplicity to USC as they try to narrow down what works for their transition.

“Choose a couple [of figs] … really find your values and push those things — not one thing, [but also] not everything,” Malkowska said. “You can do anything but not everything.”

This is the fate that young professionals need to accept: that one can do anything, but not everything, because limitation is what makes a human … human.

The greater moral of Plath’s novel is exactly this: that it is impossible to choose everything, so it is better to choose something than nothing. As a school, USC is replete with endless opportunities that encourage students to explore expression through the arts as well as excellence in the sciences, in business, or in philosophy, to name a few.

Students can experience choice paralysis just as intensely when there is too much to choose from as when there are limited options, much like Greenwood.

Malkowska said that free-form course selection, balancing her extracurricular commitments, like the dance team and the International Student Association, and the freedom to delay declaring a major, only heightens the overwhelm of abundance that USC has to offer.

“The fact that you don’t need to choose [your major] until your sophomore year, and the fact that you can mix and match all of your classes, is … extremely overwhelming,” Malkowska said. “I’m 18 years old, I just started to explore my career paths, and I don’t know what I want to be yet.”

Sebastian Villa, a freshman majoring in political science, said he felt overwhelmed when he first began to make choices and assess his own identity when faced with so many opportunities. As a first-generation student, he feels he has a duty as a son and a brother to make the government a better institution, and it takes the right networking, association and opportunities to achieve that.

“One of the most overwhelming parts of college is understanding who you want to associate yourself with and the type of activities you want to be associated with,” Villa said. Every small decision feels defining and deeply personal, so it feels like the pressure is insurmountable, especially for first-year students.

It is a daunting task to ask freshmen to catalyse their coming-of-age experience as quickly as possible, especially when there is so much exposure to curated content of people across the internet portraying selectively successful segments of their lives. One must release their grip on what they previously thought themselves to be in order to step into versions of themselves that are assets to today’s contemporary community, just as Greenwood had to do in her own time.

Villa said coming of age looks like “letting go of everything that you knew for so long in your life.” It is the first time in a young person’s life that they allow themselves to swim in uncertainty for a little bit, to let go and be lost before finding a new footing.

On the other end of the spectrum, as seniors come to the close of their college years, they will have to demonstrate future-proof innovation as they enter labor markets that are constantly transforming. It becomes more about what is practical for these individuals as they step into the real world.

Plath’s main thematic conflict in her novel is that of practicality versus passion, as Greenwood wrestles with whether to pursue her dream of being a writer, secure a stable job in medicine, or settle down with a well-off man and have a family.

Sana Sanjeev, a senior majoring in economics, originally was on a pre-med track before deciding to switch. But economics wouldn’t have even been her choice if she had it her way. Sanjeev said, without the pressure of practicality, she would pursue a career in the literary arts.

“Because, yeah, you do have more choices as a woman now, but again, the stereotypes sometimes work against you,” Sanjeev said.

It seems that the fig tree metaphor and the message it conveys aren’t going anywhere and will stand as it is taken out of its true context: the paradox of limitless choice that becomes limiting. This is proven not only by the seemingly perennial presence of the trend on social media, but also by USC students’ response to the metaphor as a modern-day case study.

Daniela Rocha Acosta, a senior majoring in law, history and culture, deviated from her high school dream of becoming a cross-country athlete to pursue a doctorate in either history or ethnic studies. She said choice paralysis can be created as a result of the privilege of having choices, a luxury that speaks to the progress that’s been achieved since the context in which Plath wrote, especially for women.

“I would say I’ve gone through many instances in my life where I was kind of paralysed by choice, and in a good way,” Acosta said. “Other people wish that they had choices.”

In the shadow of Plath’s fig tree, the faces of USC are a living appendix to feminist history. The persistence of Plath’s story is not just proof that women still find themselves tragic heroines, but also evidence that students are theorising their own situations through metaphors that speak to them.