Must We Do Everything?

05/12/2025

When I was young, I wanted to be great, to be famous, and to be memorable. Does this change as you get older? I think it does. Although I am not much older, and not much wiser either. Perhaps I shall change my mind again, perhaps in a mere two years I shall dream of greatness.

I suppose it is difficult to pick one thing when you know you can't have it all; you are forced instead to choose who you want to be. Everyone has dreams and desires for the future, and when you see them all ahead of you, it is gut-wrenching to pick just one. It is like Plath wrote, her Fig Tree. “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 [...] 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.”

So must we choose only one? Resign our lives to just one choice and hope that this was the right one? Or instead, shall we try and pick every single one, grab greedily at the branches and pull all of them off until we can grab no more. But then what do we have? We cannot consume it all, cannot live all these lives to our own satisfaction. Would you rather do one thing well or five things mediocre? In a world where we are constantly being distracted, constantly turning to bright screens instead of sunlight, it is not impossible to think we could do it all. Yet, work that is done distracted is not often work done well.

You can have many things if you work hard, I believe, but you can't have it all. You can never have everything. So what is the answer? To go all in on one life and never look back, strive to become that? Or should we do everything? Minds can change, and we are only young; experience is invaluable. I do not think there is an answer, and I'm not sure we will ever know if we have chosen the right one. Perhaps we will never know. Yet, at least we can pick one to save all from rotting.