Fig Tree Analogy

Submission 1,565

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

Fig Tree Analogy refers to a famous passage from Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar comparing the heroine's possible futures to figs on a branch of a fig tree, rotting because she will not pick one. In spring 2024, users on TikTok turned the reference into an image macro meme and began posting photographs of a fig tree branch with each fruit object labeled with a possible future they identified for themselves, accompanied by an audio of a female voice reading the passage.

Origin

In Sylvia Plath's book The Bell Jar, published in 1963, the depressed narrator Esther imagines a fig tree representing her possible futures:

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 quote has been widely discussed and famous for decades. In 2017, it was featured in the Netflix series Master of None as a major plot point.^[1] Discussions online have frequently referenced the quote, with documented references to the "fig tree analogy" on X and Tumblr reaching back to the early 2010s.

The image of a fig branch used in the meme derives from a stock photo produced in 2018 depicting a fig tree (seen below).^[2] Many commenters on videos participating in the meme, however, reported that they searched "fig tree" in Pinterest and used the first photo which popped up as a result, which was in turn taken from an article that used the stock photo.^[3]

The audio accompanying the trend was first posted on June 13th, 2020, in the video (seen below left) by @gillianlovesfilms on TikTok, and titled "use this sound if ur depressed and anxious."^[4] The earliest findable post (seen below right) combining the photo with the audio and object-labeling of each fig was made on March 19th, 2024, by @dreamsofyyume and earned over 127,400 likes and 918,800 views over the course of a month.^[5]

Spread

A post by em.bisous on April 6th, 2024, participating in the trend (seen below left) received over 1.5 million views and 220,000 likes in two weeks, making it the most popular post in the trend.^[6] Usually, the posts worked as slideshows with the first photo being a portrait of the poster or a fig-related image and the second being the object-labeled fig tree.

On X, posters joked about how TikTokers might misunderstand the original meaning of the analogy. For example, @nesplease made a post about the trend on April 14th which earned 19,000 likes in five days (seen below).^[7]