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 ↗
It was reading out loud, but no longer. (I am dyslexic.) I was encouraged by my husband to do a speech for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, which helped me gain my confidence, and the fear disappeared.
That we will drown in plastic waste.
Dying: I’m too iconic to go.
Running out of options.
I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope.
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.
Impatient, ambitious and happy.
I have never been able to become an atheist and, even though I know it is completely irrational and cannot be backed up, I think when I die I’m going to glory.
I am so obdurate I do not change my mind.
Like it’s worth being alive.
Warren Buffett, Norman Lear, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Fiona Allen, David Chang, Tina Turner
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