At twenty-five, I lay awake at night fearing the wrong life. It’s not tragic. Just a disappointing one. I was afraid that I wouldn’t build financial security that allowed you to breathe, and that I wouldn’t build a family that made a house feel like home. These two scares ran the entire show. Every big decision in my twenties was really just an attempt to get ahead of them.
I think most of us in our twenties fear the same handful of things. Fall back. Choosing the wrong one. Ending up with a life that looks beautiful on the outside and feels empty on the inside. The future feels like a big open field, and the fear is that you’ll get through it badly.
What is the young woman afraid of?
When you’re young, your fears are almost always about the future, because the future is still where you live. You haven’t built anything yet, so you’re afraid of building it wrong. You’re afraid of a career that doesn’t work out, a relationship that doesn’t last, money that doesn’t come in, that if you take a few bad turns, you might become a version of yourself.
There’s a reason this season is so buzzing. Laura CarstensenA Stanford University psychologist who studies how emotions change throughout life explains that when time horizons seem long, “people are constantly preparing, trying to absorb all possible information, taking risks, exploring.” A young woman lives with the whole field still in front of her, and this openness is equally thrilling and frightening. He is afraid because he has everything to lose.
What is the old woman afraid of?
The irony is that fear doesn’t just grow as the stakes rise. It changes form and calms down in many ways. Carstensen’s research found that “Stress, anxiety, anger decrease with age.” A seventy-five-year-old version of the same woman isn’t lying awake over a career that won’t take off. He already knows how his career went. He knows how the marriage is going, how the children are going, whether the money is coming or not.
What is left to fear? From what I understand, the fears of the afterlife are calmer and yet more severe. They are no longer engaged in construction. They are about saving. Fear of outliving your loved ones. Fear of being a burden to the children you once carried. Fear of a non-cooperative body and fear of being remembered as less than you. The future is no longer an open field. It’s a smaller room and the fear is still about who will be there.
When this happens, no one announces this transition. There is no birthday where you wake up and replace one set of scares with another. It happens slowly, in small moments you barely notice. For the first time, you worry more about your parent’s ladder than your own. For the first time, a friend’s diagnosis scares you more than your own ambition. By the time you feel the change, it has been going on for years.
The distance between them
Here, I keep flipping. The twenty-five-year-old is afraid that he will not be able to save his life. A seventy-five-year-old woman is afraid of losing the life she bought. If you could put those two women in the same room, neither would understand what the other was afraid of. The young man would not understand how precious the open field was. The old man was having a hard time remembering why the field was ever scary.
The distance between the fear of the future and the fear of losing it is not a waste of time. It is life itself. Everything you build to silence your first fear ends up being what you fear losing. Career, marriage, children, ordinary mornings. You spend the first half of your life afraid that you won’t be able to get them, and the second half you are afraid to let them go.
I find something almost pleasant about this design. The fear that drives you forward when you’re young is the instinct that teaches you to appreciate everything when you’re old. It is not two separate emotions, but one continuous thread. A young woman and an old woman are always afraid of the same thing. Both are afraid of the life they are only half living. They just stand on opposite sides of it.
Carstensen describes the shift gently. As our sense of time shortens, he says: “We see our priorities most clearly. We focus less on trivial things. We enjoy life. We are more grateful.” Fear does not go away. It cleans. He stops chasing things that never matter and settles around those who do.
I am now thirty-three years old, somewhere in the middle of a long journey between two women. I can see that my fears are already starting to act. I worry less about whether I’m ahead of where I should be and more about whether I’m paying enough attention to the people in the room next to me right now. My daughter is at the kitchen island in the morning. At night, my husband is on the table. I think it’s a fear spiraling back into its old form years in advance.
If you’re twenty-five and you’re afraid of the wrong life, I wouldn’t tell you to stop being afraid. This fear is real. It’s building something that you’ll fear losing one day, which is exactly how it should go. That’s the only thing worth adding. Try to enjoy the field while it’s still open, because one day the fear will change and you’ll miss being afraid of so many possibilities.
