What If the People Who Stopped Were Never Lost

Tommy Pickles picked up his toy screwdriver and broke out of his crib every episode because “A baby's gotta do what a baby's gotta do.” Goku trained until his body broke and then trained harder. Ash Ketchum left home at ten and chased an undefined dream for 25 years without questioning it. Commander Taggart said, “Never give up, never surrender,” and millions of young people took the phrase to heart, even though it was written as a parody. The message was everywhere. Never quit, and never give up. Even failure teaches us ways to keep reaching. No matter how many times someone falls, “Just keep swimming.” We are raised on stories about persistence, and it starts before we are old enough to know what a story even is.

Then, another narrative showed up. This one teaches that knowing individual limits is wisdom. Walking away from something is not a weakness. Most people hold both stories in their heads and never examine the tension between them. Some try to merge them and identify those inner limits in order to break through. Or, they learn when to quit to understand that greatness hurts. As the old adage goes, “It’s lonely at the top.” These mashups sound good in an Instagram caption, but even a little scrutiny tears the whole facade down. They assume every limit is temporary and all pain is productive. The tension between these ideas is exactly what Rhett Davis explores in his novel Arborescence (2025).

Instead of making any assumptions, Arborescence invites the reader to investigate a world where people are literally transforming into trees, and it never tells whether that is the worst or the best thing that could ever happen. In a near future wrought with government failure and climate collapse, people begin to arboresce. They stand still, stop eating and drinking, and stop speaking. Roots thread from their feet and dig into the soil, bark crawls over their skin, and branches erupt through bone. The transformation is extremely painful and irreversible, and not always successful. The world watches and cannot agree on what it means.

The novel's primary perspective is provided by Bren, who is, mostly, a passive observer. Just as the reader is passive, Bren is not quick to pass judgment or to act rashly. He facilitates the journey over the years it takes to tell the story in full. Over time, he finds comfort in what is broken rather than in what people have built. Bren is not like the characters of American youth; he is not really trying to break through or achieve anything.

Davis is careful about who he lets arboresce. The old and the dying do it first, and society accepts that. Then children do it. People cannot accept the reality that children might decide to transcend human existence in favor of the stationary life of a tree. They don’t die, and no one is grieving the dead. Those that remain are coping with a loss that doesn’t seem to close because these individuals chose to stop being human, and that choice defies human understanding. 

Travis, Bren's brother, watches their mother stand in the backyard for days with roots anchoring her bare feet to the ground. He says she has given up. Bren says she believes in something. Neither is wrong nor right. Davis intentionally leaves explicit judgment or opinion absent throughout the text, making a case for either a positive or a negative outlook the responsibility of the reader. Like most opinions, the work of analysis and outlook is personal, private work, and Davis illustrates that through their mother’s arborescence.

Bren himself nearly arboresces as well, but his former partner, Caelyn, pulls him back with experimental technology. When he wakes up, he writhes in pain. He says he was “so close,” and the utter sadness in that is not the grief of someone who trod the line between life and death. It's closer to someone who almost became something entirely new, only to be dragged back to the life they were trying to leave behind. It’s never made fully clear whether or not his failure to change is a betrayal or a rescue. While the incident certainly changed and scarred Bren, he never tries to arboresce again.

The "greatness hurts" crowd never talks about the pain of failure caused by their loved ones’ actions. Transformation is painful, sure, but so is being denied it. So is being told that the people who love one another have a claim on who they are. It raises an ethical question about familial and communal responsibility. Davis is definitely not taking sides, but he does force the reader to ask “How much about one’s person actually belongs to another, and does anyone have the right or in turn, the responsibility to continue to exist for the sake of another person’s benefit?” even if that benefit is as simple as filling a familial role.

Davis never gives the answers to any of the questions he raises. He never says that the people who stop are brave, nor does he call them cowards. He does not say persistence is a lie or surrender is wisdom. Instead, Davis builds a world in which all those narratives exist simultaneously and asks the reader to digest the discomfort of not knowing what is true.

Real transformation does not live in the motivational poster, the therapist's gentle permission to quit, or that TikTok from somebody who lives in an unfamiliar place and leads an unfamiliar life. It lives in the spaces, like when a mother stands in her backyard, with roots growing from her feet, where one son says she has given up, and the other says she believes in the future, and both are crying.