Economic disaster would be my greatest fear just because I lived just after the depression and saw the results of it in my family.

[agnostic.com]

having read 1984, i know better than to publicize my greatest fear.

g

I am not sure I have significant fears, such that I could pick one out as my Worst Nightmare. All the stuff I used to imagine as unthinkable occurrences have pretty much already happened.

But I suppose the number one thing I try to avoid is bad health. I have similar levels of concern about failing my loved ones (in their eyes) but that is something I have no control over beyond doing my best, which I invariably do. The rest of that involves Other People and their fecklessness and random judgments and unreasonable expectations, and that's just going to have to be what it is.

But if you don't have decent health, you are constrained in virtually every aspect of life, including being present for those you love.

I am constitutionally opposed to exercise and health food but pursue them anyway because I don't want body parts to start falling off. As a diabetic, that's particularly important. I know a diabetic guy who has weird infections on his shins (for some reason, not his thighs or feet) from garden-variety staph. He has angry rashes and open sores all the time. He also has COPD and carries an oxygen concentrator around, which constantly drones and pumps and bleeps at him when he breathes a little funny. He seldom sleeps soundly for more than 3 hours each night. He's still locomoting around, but I get the sense he is always trying to distract himself from his personal misery, and a good day for him doesn't involve pleasure, but distraction from discomfort and pain. That is something I'm trying very hard to avoid.

Am I afraid of it? That's not exactly the term. I respect the possibility enough to try to avoid it. But life is full of random bullshit and so who knows. I have an aortic aneurysm in a particularly hard-to-fix spot that may require open heart surgery with cardiac bypass at some point, an experience which is apt to make me wish I were dead for the several months it will take to fully and truly recover, by all accounts. I am not afraid of it so much as just don't want / need it.

I think some of the fears people have around stuff like this is also is ultimately about the fear of death and the failure to deal with the fact of their own mortality. I have no such fear, and if my life becomes sufficiently fucked, I will simply end it. I will not have negligible quality of life just to avoid death. So to me every one of the above possibilities is finite and manageable. I have agency in it.