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.
I become very anxious if I think I’ve hurt someone.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 January 2026 source ↗
Collapse of the imagination.
Not enough food in the fridge.
Heights, and not getting along with people.
The fact that, until recently, “the end of the world” would have seemed pretentious and evasive, and now seems like the only possible answer.
On X, I am regularly called a traitor, a fraud, a grifter, a weakling, a narcissist, a coward and a child molester.
Living in a ski resort.
A painting of a man who was killed on the Dutch coast in 1600.
The US election showed me that I had trapped myself in wishful thinking.
Surprise. Smiles. Courage. Safety.
Carelessness of truth and others.
Charles Osgood, Bob Schieffer, Gloria Steinem, Keir Starmer, Caroline Lucas, Monica Lewinsky
Search the directory for somebody in particular.