The Figs Are Falling: Why We Mourn the Lives We'll Never Live

By Heartscape Intern, Tan Min Wen

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story… 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

The famous analogy of the fig tree comes from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, when confronted with the countless possibilities of life, becomes paralysed by her many magnificent futures. Each fig on the fig tree symbolises a life she can have, a person she can become — a wife and a mother, a poet, a professor, a wanderess, a philosopher, an editor, an athlete. She wants everything and yet cannot have it all. And, unable to bear choosing one and losing all others, she remains stagnant, unchoosing, until one by one, each possibility wilts away without her choosing anything at all.

You might be familiar with this tree, even if you’ve never come across this analogy yourself. We are born into lives of endless possibilities and forced to choose only one or a few in our short, finite time on this planet. Very often, picking one fig means losing all others. Choosing to pursue a specific career means not pursuing something else. Moving abroad means the place you called home for most of your life will never feel the same again; choosing to stay means never meeting the version of you you would’ve become if you’d moved abroad. Choosing to have children means career opportunities lost and your freedom to do as you wish reduced as you become responsible for another; choosing not to means opting out of the joy of parenthood. Every step we take in a direction means a step further away from another. Yet, the time will pass anyway. Time brings us forward even when we never take a step. So, if making one choice means losing all others, and when making no choice means losing them all, how then do we cope with the loss of what could’ve been and the versions of us we’ll never become?

The loss of lives unlived is a form of symbolic loss.

Symbolic Loss

In grief psychology, symbolic loss is the loss of something intangible, that cannot be seen or heard or touched (Figley, 2012). Unlike standard grief, which has a concrete object of loss, symbolic loss exists in the abstract. Nothing was physically taken from you because you never actually possessed any of those alternate life paths. Yet, the emotional void created by their absence feels entirely real.

Symbolic loss shows up whenever we must surrender an intangible dream, role, or future. It shows up as you mourn the risky, ambitious career you walked away from to take a stable job; or when you grieve the healthy, unburdened version of yourself before a major life shift or illness. It shows up in the form of an imagined family structure that never came to fruition; or in the realisation that you’ll never be able to live the heteronormative life you always thought you’d have.

In Plath’s fig tree analogy, the rotting figs aren’t physical fruit; they represent the abstract, symbolic death of alternate selves. Because you cannot hold a funeral for a career you never started or a family you never built, the symbolic loss remains invisible to the outside world. When you hit a major milestone or watch a peer live out the exact path you abandoned, the grief of that phantom fig flares up again, and you stand, once again, at the chasm between what is and what could have been, mourning what never was.

The Rotting Figs: Why Do They Haunt Us?

Finitude anxiety is a concept introduced by existential psychologist Irvin Yalom (1980). Rooted in existentialism (the philosophy that we are cursed with freedom and the responsibility that comes with it), it is the tragedy of human mortality: however infinite our imagination and ambition may be, we are brutally limited by our time, energy, and physical body. To be human is to be bound by time and attention. You cannot be in two places at once; you cannot have every fig on the tree. Missing out on alternative lives is a fundamental condition of making choices in your limited lifetime.

This existential fear most commonly occurs as a result of mortality salience in people diagnosed with serious or terminal illness, or in older adults as they become aware of life’s end (Alcântara et al., 2025). Being confronted with our mortality often forces us to come to terms with all that we have not yet experienced or accomplished. However, you do not have to be facing death to experience finitude anxiety. Just like Esther Greenwood and her fig tree, we can also be made acutely aware of our finitude when it comes the time for us to make major life decisions or go through developmental transitions.

But if thinking about all these lost possibilities brings so much grief, why do our brains keep dragging us back to the rotting figs?

The human brain has a tendency to generate counterfactuals, which are mental simulations of “what might have been” (Epstude & Roese, 2008). Counterfactuals play an important role in behavioural regulation by responding to specific deficits and prompting us to correct our behaviour accordingly. However, when we almost always engage in upward counterfactual thinking, comparing our reality to a better, unlived path, we end up longing for an imaginary life while forgetting to appreciate our own.

It is easy to glamorise a life we have never lived. We look at our real, messy present — full of chores and routine and bogged down by the mundane — and find ourselves escaping into the impossibility of an alternative life. In our heads, everything is exciting and fulfilling and friction-free. After all, it only lives in our imagination. We forget, however, that the unchosen fig is but a symbolic fantasy, stripped of the stressors and bad days it would have inevitably contained. Perhaps if you’d chosen that fig instead, you’d also be longing, in parallel, for the life you have now.

Mourning the Figs: How Do We Cope With Their Loss?

The symbolic loss of our unlived lives is an unavoidable tax on being human. Because we cannot outrun this loss, moving through it requires Radical Acceptance, a core principle of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) that invites us to acknowledge reality as it is without fighting it (Segal et al., 2023).

Instead of waging a mental war against the strict limits of time and choice, Radical Acceptance helps us to untangle our optional suffering from our inevitable pain. While this may sound like passive resignation, it is actually the first active step toward meaningful change: you cannot navigate to a new destination until you accept where you are currently standing.

Radical Acceptance does not ask you to pretend that the figs never wilted; it asks you to stop trying to glue the dead fruit back onto the branches. Paradoxically, it is often our finitude that gives weight and purpose to our choices, and makes what we do with our lives so meaningful. When you accept that you cannot live every life, you free up all the energy you were spending on grief, and can finally redirect it toward the one life you actually have.

The next time you find yourself lamenting the unchosen fig, pause to ask yourself what this fig actually represents to you. Is it freedom? Creativity? Spontaneity? Risk? While it is important to dismantle the idealised fantasy of the unchosen path, these phantom lives often act as mirrors, taking the shape of whatever values feel starved in your present routine. Identifying these missing elements allows you to weave them into your current reality, giving you a way to ease the ache without having to burn your entire life down to chase a ghost.

After all, the tree is still standing. The figs are never truly wilted, and it is never too late to reach out and pluck one.

References

Alcântara, L., Figueiredo, T., Midão, L., Costa, E., & Paúl, C. (2025). Psychological and behavioural responses to death anxiety in older adults with chronic illnesses: a systematic integrative review. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1684385. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1684385 

Epstude, K., & Roese, N. J. (2008). The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(2), 168–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308316091 

Plath, S. (1963). The Bell Jar. Harper & Row. 

Segal, O., Sher, H., Aderka, I. M., & Weinbach, N. (2023). Does acceptance lead to change? Training in radical acceptance improves implementation of cognitive reappraisal. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 164, 104303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2023.104303. 

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books/Hachette Book Group.