I am afraid of getting old.

There. I have said it out loud.

It is not something I bring up at dinner parties or casual conversations, but it sits with me like a quiet fear I cannot shake. As someone who has chosen to walk through life single and without children, the prospect of being seventy-five or eighty with no immediate family circle feels particularly daunting. I imagine myself in an empty apartment, wondering who would notice if I did not answer my phone for a few days.

Society does not make this fear any easier to bear. We live in a world that treats aging like approaching an expiration date — which, if we’re really being honest, it technically is. But the cruelest part is not the biological reality of mortality; it is the social judgment that comes with it. The subtle message that as our hair grays and our steps slow, we become less valuable, less relevant, less worthy of attention. It is as if usefulness has an age limit, and I am watching the countdown timer tick away.

What terrifies me most is not death itself — it is the slow fade into irrelevance. I fear the day when my opinions no longer matter in meetings, when younger colleagues stop seeking my advice, when I am no longer included in the conversations that shape the world around me. The thought of becoming invisible while still breathing feels worse than not being here at all. It is the difference between being gone and being forgotten while one is still present.

This fear drives me in ways I’m only beginning to understand. I find myself constantly learning new technologies at work, not just because I enjoy them, but because I am terrified of falling behind. I read about AI, digital, tech, and societal trends and whatever new app everyone’s using, as if staying current might somehow protect me from becoming obsolete. It can be exhausting, this constant race against irrelevance, but I cannot seem to stop running.

But here’s what keeps me awake at night: I know there will probably come a time when the learning becomes harder, when my curiosity dims, when I lose the energy or interest to keep up with the relentless pace of change.

What happens when I reach that cliff of uselessness? When the gap between what I know and what the world demands becomes too wide to bridge?

The thought of that moment feels like staring into an abyss.

Yet somewhere beneath this fear lives a stubborn hope. I have met people in their seventies and eighties who still burn bright with curiosity, who still engage with the world around them with genuine interest and wisdom. They have not just aged — they strove to grow. Their usefulness has not faded; it has transformed into something deeper than keeping up with trends or knowing the latest software. They offer perspective, patience, and hard-won understanding.

Maybe the key is not avoiding the cliff of uselessness but redefining what useful means. Perhaps true value is not measured by how quickly we adapt to new technology or how relevant we remain to the latest conversations. Maybe it’s found in the stories we carry, the wounds we have healed from, the quiet wisdom that comes from having lived through decades of human experience. Maybe getting older means trading one kind of usefulness for another — deeper — one.

So while the fear remains real and raw — and even visceral, I am trying to nurture a different vision of my future self.

I hope that when I am seventy or eighty, I will still be learning, not because I am desperate to stay relevant, but because curiosity itself has become my companion. I hope I will still be involved in things that matter to me, even if those things look different than they do today.

Most of all, I hope I will have learned that aging gracefully is not about avoiding irrelevance; it is about discovering new ways to be human that I never knew were possible.