I turned 70 last month, and on my birthday I did something I haven’t done in decades: I made a list. Not a bucket list or a list of goals I still want to achieve. I made a list of all the things I’ve been afraid of throughout my life. It took me three hours. The list was long, detailed, specific in a way that surprised me. I’d forgotten how vividly I had imagined disasters, how much mental energy I’d spent on contingency plans for catastrophes that never materialized.
I was afraid of being poor. My parents weren’t wealthy, and I grew up with a specific anxiety about money that shaped nearly every decision I made. I turned down opportunities that might have been fun because they didn’t come with immediate financial security. I stayed in jobs I disliked for decades because they had steady paychecks.
I was afraid of being sick. From about age 25 onward, I lived in a state of low-level health anxiety. Every symptom was potentially catastrophic. Every pain might be a tumor. I made unnecessary doctor’s appointments, requested tests I didn’t need, read medical articles late into the night.
I was afraid of being alone. For most of my life, I believed that my value depended on having a partner, on being chosen by someone. This fear made me say yes to relationships that weren’t right for me. It made me compromise on things that mattered.
I was afraid of being judged. This one was pervasive, a thread running through everything. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing at parties, so I often said nothing. I was afraid of being perceived as stupid, so I pretended to know things I didn’t. I was afraid of being seen as selfish, so I said yes to requests I wanted to refuse.
I was afraid of failure. I didn’t start certain businesses because I was afraid they wouldn’t work. I didn’t pursue creative interests because I was afraid I wouldn’t be good at them. I lived a kind of pre-emptive failure, avoiding the possibility of falling short by never really trying.
Now I’m 70, and I can tell you with absolute certainty: most of those things I was afraid of either never happened, or when they did happen, they were manageable in ways I never anticipated. I did experience financial stress, but the world didn’t end. I experienced illness—minor illnesses, nothing catastrophic—and I handled them. I experienced loneliness, and it was uncomfortable, but it was also clarifying.
What haunts me now is not the disasters I feared, but the life I didn’t live because of that fear. The relationships I didn’t pursue because I was afraid of rejection. The conversations I didn’t have because I was afraid of conflict. The dreams I set aside because I was afraid they were unrealistic. The time I spent worrying about things that never happened—time I can never get back.
I think about the version of myself at 25, so constrained by anxiety about the future that I could barely enjoy the present. I think about the things that version of me wanted to do and didn’t do. And I’m filled with a kind of grief that’s hard to describe, because I’m grieving not something that happened, but something that didn’t.
There’s research on what psychologists call worry about the past versus worry about the future, and it turns out that people who spend a lot of time anxious about hypothetical future events tend to experience higher rates of depression and lower life satisfaction. Studies suggest that rumination and future-focused anxiety often stem from the same underlying cognitive patterns, and that learning to accept uncertainty is actually one of the most powerful tools for improving mental health.
If I could talk to my younger self, I would tell him that fear is a liar. It tells you that terrible things are likely when they’re actually improbable. It tells you that you’re not capable of handling adversity when the truth is that humans are remarkably resilient. Fear is a liar, and the price of believing it is enormous.
I’m not saying that at 70 I’ve suddenly become fearless. I have different fears now. I’m afraid of dementia. I’m afraid of becoming a burden to my children. But these fears are different because they’re grounded in actual stakes rather than hypothetical catastrophes.
What’s changed is that I’m much less likely to let fear paralyze me now. If I want to do something, I’m more likely to just do it. If I want to tell someone something, I tell them. The stakes feel lower now, or maybe I can finally see that the stakes were never as high as I thought they were.
The thing I’m afraid of now, more than anything else, is that I’ve wasted decades of my one finite life being afraid of things that never happened. I’ve come to understand that regret can be a clarifying force, but only if you let it teach you something before it’s too late.
I’m telling you this because maybe you’re where I was, living in your head with your fears, constructing a very small life in service of avoiding a very large catastrophe that probably won’t happen. I’m telling you that the years go by faster than you can imagine, and one day you’ll be 70 and you’ll realize that the thing you should have been afraid of all along wasn’t disease or poverty or being alone. It was this: wasting the only life you get on fear of a future that never comes.
