Increasing The Surface Area For Luck
How do you choose a life path when every option feels like losing something else?
In The Bell Jar, life appears as a fig tree, each future hanging, waiting, and slowly rotting as you hesitate. But what if this metaphor is the very thing keeping us stuck?
In this video essay I explores why the fig tree analogy fails us and how philosophers like Anne Dufourmantelle and Luce Irigaray help us rethink what it means to “choose” a life at all.
Drawing on In Praise of Risk, this essay argues that life is not something we select from a menu of fixed identities but something we enter through rupture, uncertainty, and transformation.
________________________________________
💌 My Instagram – josephinewritess
✍️ My Substack & personal essays – https://writesjosephine.substack.com
🎙️ Josephine Podcast is now live ONLY on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1gCE...
________________________________________
References & Further Reading:
– The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
– In Praise of Risk – Anne Dufourmantelle (trans. Steven Miller)
– The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger – Luce Irigaray
– The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
If you know any of the artists please let me know so I can reference them too
0:00 Fig Tree Analogy
1:30 Sylvia Plath
4:40 why choice feels paralysing
7:44 The danger of Heidegger’s idea of “roots”
11:00 Luce Irigaray and air
16:30 Praising Risk
25:00 The Passion According to GH