The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Not being loved.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 March 2026 source ↗
When I was growing up, I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger fear to contend with on a day‑to-day basis. It hasn’t proved to be a bother yet, but there’s still time.
Incapacitation.
Wasting my life.
Safety of loved ones.
Every single morning the sun comes up and you get to try again.
My A-level results in 1998. I flunked my history A-level and lost my place at Cambridge. It broke my heart for years; now I’m really glad, because I pull out the whole “I went to a polytechnic” thing. But at the time for a teenager who was rather pleased with herself, it was absolutely devastating.
Impatient, ambitious and happy.
I understand that you lose the register of hearing that enables you to hear crickets, and when I can’t hear crickets in the summer I’ll be really sad.
I am so obdurate I do not change my mind.
I often hate-read the Daily Mail. It’s the worst of media and the worst of mankind distilled into one publication and in some ways it feels a moral duty to be familiar with it. Too often we all bolt ourselves into an echo chamber, which I think lacks courage, and can lead to a kind of intellectual conceitedness.
Lena Dunham, Kerry Godliman, John Simm, Bobbi Brown, Trevor Noah, Matthew Modine
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