'Nobody wants to work anymore' and Sylvia Plath's figs

We’ve all heard it. Us twenty somethings don’t want to work anymore. Kim Kardashian infamously told us to get our ‘fucking ass up and work’. We expect everything handed to us on a silver platter. We want a participation trophy. We want respect where we haven’t earned it. At the same time, we’re hearing about mass job cuts and a floundering media industry and wondering if there is even a place for us.

Vice and has flipped the script on the ‘no one wants to work anymore’ argument in more meaningful ways than I could. They point out that yes, young people are struggling with the realities of entering the workforce. They also point out that things don’t need to be this way, and because of this we can, and are, breaking down the parameters of traditional work.

I recently wrote that my dreams were failing in front of me as I come to the realisation that I won’t get to be what I wanted to be when I grow up. As I finish my Master’s thesis and attempt to enter the workforce in a meaningful way, I am discovering that it doesn’t seem to want what I have to offer. I’m also discovering just how suffocating the contemporary 40 hours a week in-office culture is. On reflection, I start to wonder why I wanted to be anything when I grew up anyway.

In 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis, I was 10. Young enough to not really give a shit, but old enough to know that the adults around me had even less money than usual. I continued to not give a shit and beg for the latest Bratz dolls. I, like all the other little girls in 2008, was told to dream big. Because we could be anything we wanted to be when we grow up. We were told a bright future awaited us once we were old enough. Never mind the state of the economy, it’s a once in a lifetime event.

I for one was always told I was going to need go to university and get a job if I wanted to make anything of myself. Coming from a blue collar family I took that information and ran with it, deciding I was going to fulfill my prophecy of education and employment. My first attempt at university at 18 was a failure, but two years later I was back and beginning my History degree. I foresaw getting that degree, my Honours, my Masters, and waltzing into a satisfying and rewarding career.

Before I continue rambling on about not wanting to work, I would like to preface that I have worked since 2014, when I was sixteen. My family told me I was finally old enough to stop being a financial burden and start making my own money, so I got a job at McDonald’s. From there I worked in cafe jobs until 2022 when I started working in a library.

In 2023 I was at that library and working as a teaching assistant. When summer work wasn’t available at both places, I got a job at a place that turned out to be a call centre. I was told it would involve front desk work, which it did for some people, but never me. Instead I spent last summer answering phone calls in a basement and ignoring my thesis deadline. Near the end of my time they began to allow some people to WFH some days - I was not one of them.

That job was full time and my first foray into what I thought was going to be a big girl career. To make a long story short, the vibe was hellish and I spent every waking moment sick with anxiety. I had four hours of waking free time a day that I couldn’t enjoy because I was so anxious about what had happened that day and what might happen the next. It was hellish, and hindsight is truly a bitch because things are so much better now that it’s hard to believe I even put myself through so much stress for a JOB.

The generational divide was jarring. When I told my Grandparents that the work was making me physically sick and that I didn’t think that life was going to be like this, they just told me ‘well welcome to the real world’. Coming from a staunch working class background they probably thought I had entered the call centre industry for life and were quietly smug that I had finally had my ass handed to me. I resigned after six months and have been unemployed now for 8 weeks.

This year I have applied for 18 jobs. I have had a bunch of screening calls, 8 interviews, and 17 rejections. 1 of the 8 I withdrew my application after the interview because I accepted I need to be unemployed while I finish my thesis (and that I didn’t want to be an admin girl in a corporate finance firm). I haven’t done many applications compared to a lot of other people my age, but the job market is terrible and I have put myself into somewhat of a research and writing niche.

In the past I've always had a pretty easy time finding a job, but now with an upcoming Master’s submission, I’m becoming over-qualified and under-experienced. The main piece of feedback I get from interviewing is ‘we liked you, but our other candidate has more experience'.’ Welcome to the real world I guess.

And now it doesn’t seem like I’m going to get much experience in the meantime. My city is experiencing mass lay-offs in government, and my ideal industries like academia, heritage, and journalism are also taking an enormous hit. So for now I wallow in my unemployment while I finish my thesis and write substacks. And try not to think too hard about my future.

Within two days substack recommended me two different pieces on Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor from her novel The Bell Jar. ‘revisiting sylvia plath's fig tree’ by Pardip Kaur, and ‘sylvia plath's fig tree’ by Caitlyn from milk fed which introduced me to the fig tree metaphor. From here the recs kept spiralling and The Bell Jar began to appear everywhere.

The fig tree resonates with any of us who have felt pulled in various directions in the path of life. While I am currently being pulled in various directions, I remain unsure that any of those dreams will come to fruition. On one hand, I’m starting to feel grateful for this pull and the opportunities that it gives me. My figs are a writer, an academic, a curator, a cat rescuer, a lesbian tradwife farmer who makes her own bread. I could do it all or none of it. Most of it is out of my control.

On the other, New Zealand is officially in a recession and things don’t look to be improving anytime soon. Right now I am at a cross roads in life. I don't have a job, let alone a career, my friends are worried about losing their jobs, and the 10 year old girl in me is wondering what is going on all over again.

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I want to be an academic. I want to be a writer. I want to make a living off of the training I have had and the skills I have cultivated for my entire fucking life. It’s embarrassing because, at the end of the day, only so many of my peers, let alone myself, can become lecturers in New Zealand history in a country with a population of five million, and maybe six or seven universities with history departments. Most of us aren’t bold enough to profess our goals out load, instead saying ‘well it would be nice, but it probably won't happen for me.’ We all want to be writers and academics in a world filled to the brim with people with the same dwindling fantasies.

Presented with so many figs, I feel like I’ve been forced into a world that doesn’t want to accommodate me. Realistically I know it’s the other way around, I am being defiant and trying to fight against the rigid rules of society. To many I am being belidgerant. I am a shirker. A dole bludger. So, I read The Bell Jar. I rarely read outside of research, let alone fiction, so this was big for me.

That book is so much more than the fig tree. As Charlotte Ahlin says, it seems like most people ignore Esther’s monologue on the following page where she says:

I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

Ignoring the figs, The Bell jar summarised a lot of my experiences with womanhood so far. I have bipolar II, and much of Esther’s monologues could have been my own at points in time. I was surprised at how candidly the book discussed suidical ideation (which I shouldn’t have been, considering Plath’s fate within months of its publication).

My road to my bipolar diagnosis feels like a story for my hypothetical memoirs, but there have been huge chunks of my life where I was nothing but unhappy. There was that one period in 2020 where I too didn’t sleep for quite some time, and no one seemed to take it as seriously as it felt like they should. Reading this I had to be thankful that I’m crazy today, rather than 60 years ago, where I likely would have been locked away and electocuted.

What resonates with me is less the idea of the book representing the trappings of womanhood through being overwhelmed by the endless figs, but the actual metaphor of being stuck within a bell jar. Esther feels like she lives in a bell jar, where no one can see that she is trapped. No one knows the air is stifled. No one knows she cannot leave. The Bell Jar as a novel and as a literal metaphor speaks to so many of us who feel stifled and trapped by modern society and work culture forcing us to make a decision/choose a fig.

Thankfully I don’t feel trapped in the bell jar right now now that I am beginning to accept that the traditional parameters of work are not for me. I feel like I can seize life and appreciate the freedom of being 26 with no real responsibilities outside of paying bills and keeping my cat alive. I always feel the bell jar is on the periphery though, waiting to slam back down on me and all that is good. Especially because again, society wants nothing more than for me to be desk-ridden at a set wage.

I can also appreciate that I can have as many figs as life throws at me, I am ultimately only so in control of how many figs I get. My figs aren’t going to die, and if they do new ones will grow, because did Plath ever say anything about the tree being cut down? No, you can stand in front of it ruminating on figs until the day you starve to death if it pleases you. And perhaps I will.

Who wrote this?

I’m Isis. I’m trying to find my way and occasionally writing about the process. I live in Wellington, New Zealand with my cat Edie. Right now my days are spent working on my MA and thinking about things to blog about that have nothing to do with my research.