Having conversations with young people who you remember being born.
What scares you about getting older?
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Values & belief
Question
What role should instinct play in major decisions?
Craft & work
Question
What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
Values & belief
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I think acting your age is allowing other people to make decisions for you about how you should behave and what is age-appropriate. I encourage people to live and not be tied down with other people's expectations of what you should be doing. If you want to do something, go and do it. We overly worship the altar of youth. It's not good for our mental health. As a culture, we need to get better at seeing the beauty in aging and the beauty in things that are not young.
Eric Spitznagel, Interview, AARP, 6 January 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 69 →Getting older doesn’t scare me.
Learning lines.
The inability to do things for myself.
More from Alan Cumming
View profile →Being hit on the head with a brick, and like a bowl of hearty soup.
It’s killing the planet. It’s killing you. It’s killing all of us. Walk away.
It’s a gut thing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.
The power of positive thinking.
Dying on the same day as someone much more famous than me.
A couple of summers ago, walking through a forest illuminated by fireflies, with my man and our dogs.
More on time & hindsight
- When were you happiest? 585 answers
- What is the most important lesson life has taught you? 155 answers
- What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? 95 answers
- What is the best advice you have ever received? 38 answers
- What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself? 26 answers
- If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say and why? 25 answers
Also answered this
Geoffrey Rush, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford
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- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject