A new trend is spreading across TikTok and Instagram, and young women are vulnerable to its feminist messaging. These popular videos use an audio excerpt from the 2024 movie Here, in which a character breaks down over the opportunities she thinks she has missed.
“But I never made it to law school,” she says, voice trembling, “and I never got to see Paris in the spring, and I never got to stay over in Yellowstone because it was too crowded.”
In video after video on social media, the audio plays over a montage of women traveling, enjoying “girl time,” and pursuing higher education. Across the colorful clips appears a warning: Don’t let your figs rot.
That line comes from a concept in Sylvia Plath’s book, The Bell Jar. She describes all the potential future paths she could choose, stretching out before her like a fig tree, with each fig representing a different future. Paralyzed by indecision, she fails to act before the figs rot, leaving her life wasted.
These social media videos instruct young women to fear wasting their potential, but the implication is clear: Traditional living — marrying young, settling down, living within your means, having children, and raising them yourself at home — is what wasted potential looks like. Unless you devote your 20s and 30s to higher education, career-building, and “finding yourself” through travel and so-called self-care, you have “let your figs rot.” Fewer husbands and kids, more degrees and vacations.
The argument collapses upon inspection. At its core is the myth of “having it all,” which irrationally claims we can have our figs and eat them too. The modern life script is sold as regret-free, but it carries real opportunity costs for the women who follow it.
Just ask Brigitte Adams. Featured on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 beneath the headline “Freeze your eggs, Free your career,” Adams knows that cost firsthand.
After freezing her eggs in her late 30s, Adams dedicated more time to establishing her career before finding a man to marry. When he didn’t appear at 45, she decided to unfreeze her 11 eggs and use a sperm donor to conceive, resulting in six embryos. All of them failed.
The experience was so traumatic that she recalls “screaming like ‘a wild animal’ … and collapsing to the ground” upon recognition of her fate. She “freed” her career — but what did it cost her?
Some may say a few stories of regret don’t prove feminism has failed. Women must still be afforded freedom, the feminists argue. But despite so-called liberation, women are experiencing higher levels of anxiety and depression than before. If feminists are right that their movement is simply about freedom, we might wonder if most women are simply masochists.
Another hypothesis is that women have been duped. The culture that feminism marketed to us was not done on free and fair terms. Theirs is not a true marketplace. Markets require price transparency. Otherwise, consumers can’t make informed decisions. By concealing the true cost of their advice, feminists undermine their stated commitment to “free choice.”
This is most clearly seen in the intense backlash provoked by the tradwife movement. Why is it that mothers who share their lives online are so often treated as propagandists? Because our culture — helped along by the media — has adopted Simone de Beauvoir’s view of mothers at home: “Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Out of sight, out of mind. This is feminism’s mantra.
But feminism’s monopoly over storytelling is over. Younger generations are attracted to tradwife content, with one study finding that nearly half of Gen Z women desire traditional gender roles. Part of this might be explained by a desire for security. Cornerstone marriages, forged early in life, often build stronger lifelong relationships as husband and wife grow into adulthood together and align their ambitions toward shared goals.
Marriage also deepens life satisfaction. Research from the Institute for Family Studies suggests young married women are significantly happier than their unmarried peers, with 41 percent of married women between 22 and 35 reporting being very happy, compared to 16 percent for unmarried women in the same age group.
Young women would do well to ignore the social media algorithm and remember that degrees and vacations can usually be sought at almost any stage of life. You can’t have your first child at 45 while unmarried as easily as you could book your first trip to the Dolomites.
Choosing early marriage and family may mean fewer stamps in your passport, less disposable income, and fewer letters after your name. But it offers something rarer and more enduring: love. In the ordinary rhythms of home, marriage and motherhood give women a share in a miraculous and wholly different adventure.
Feminism sold us independence; love requires mutual dependence. I chose love. Maybe that means fewer degrees or fewer trips, but I traded them for a sweeter fruit. Once you’ve tasted it, everything else pales in comparison.
