← Blog

A friend asked me on the beach: are you afraid of getting old?

September 15, 2026

A friend asked me on the beach: are you afraid of getting old?

We were walking along the water at sunset, the conversation was about nothing in particular — plans for the evening, who was eating what for dinner — and suddenly a friend asked, out of nowhere: are you afraid of getting old? The question caught me off guard precisely because of how direct it was. Not "how do you feel about aging" in some polite, philosophical phrasing, but flat out: are you afraid or not.

I thought about it, because the honest answer turned out to be more complicated than the simple yes or no I was about to give on autopilot. I started peeling back the feeling layer by layer as I walked along the sand, and realized I'm not afraid of what I usually assume I'm afraid of. Not age itself as a number. Not wrinkles, not gray hair, not changes in appearance — honestly, those things never worried me much. I'm afraid of losing the ability to do what genuinely matters to me: moving freely, thinking clearly, staying useful to the people around me, having a real conversation instead of just being present in the room.

Age itself, as I realized that day on the beach, isn't scary at all. What's scary is the imagined picture of helplessness I paint for myself looking ahead — a picture assembled from other people's stories, from movies, from random observations of strangers in a hard situation, not from my own experience, because I simply don't have that experience yet.

And here's what's interesting: when I started deliberately recalling genuinely elderly people I actually knew personally — not the abstract image of "old age" in my head — the picture turned out completely different. Most of them never came across as helpless or unhappy. Many were noticeably calmer and more confident than people a third their age. They had a clarity about what actually matters and what doesn't — a clarity I myself sometimes badly lack right now.

I told my friend this right there on the beach, and he said something that stayed with me: the fear of old age almost always lives in the heads of people who haven't gotten old yet, not in the heads of people who already have. People inside old age are usually busy living, not afraid of something that's already arrived and turned out nowhere near as scary as the imagination painted it in advance.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of your health, your body, your mental clarity — of course you should, and the earlier the better. But the fear of the fact of aging itself, detached from any concrete, real actions, often turns out much bigger and darker than whatever it supposedly predicts. We're not afraid of what will happen, but of our own fantasy about what might happen — and those are two very different things.

Open the app