By: Hawi Bussa
There are days when I look in the mirror and see the same face I’ve always known. And then there are days when I catch a glimpse of myself and feel like time is playing tricks on me—like I blinked, and suddenly, I’m not as young as I used to be. The changes are subtle at first, but they add up. A fine line here. A body that takes longer to recover. A feeling that somehow, life is moving faster than I can keep up with. And if I’m being completely honest, that scares me.
We live in a world that doesn’t just celebrate youth—it clings to it. We are constantly fed the idea that the best years of our lives are the ones where we are young, attractive, and full of potential. Social media makes it worse, turning age into a performance where everyone is trying to look like they haven’t changed, like they haven’t felt the weight of time pressing down on them. We watch celebrities, influencers, even people we know doing whatever it takes to slow down the inevitable—filters, surgeries, an obsession with anything “anti-aging.” And whether we admit it or not, we internalize it. The fear of aging isn’t just about looking older; it’s about what that means. Will we still be valued? Will we still be wanted? Will we still have time to become the people we always thought we’d be?
This fear exists everywhere, not just in Western societies where the beauty industry profits off our insecurities. It exists in urban cities where job markets favor younger candidates. It exists in cultures where marriage and children come with an invisible deadline. It exists in spaces where technology moves so fast that people who were once on the cutting edge now feel like they are struggling to keep up. The fear of getting older isn’t just about our reflection in the mirror—it’s about the fear of becoming obsolete.
It’s easy for people to say, just live life to the fullest, don’t worry about getting older, but that’s not how fear works. The truth is, aging is unsettling. It forces us to confront things we’d rather not think about—our mortality, the things we haven’t done yet, the fact that time doesn’t wait for us to be ready. And it’s okay to be afraid of that. It’s okay to feel anxious when another year passes, to wonder if you’re on the right path, to wish you could slow it all down. That fear is human. It means you care. It means you’re aware of how fragile and fleeting life really is.
But maybe instead of trying to erase that fear, we can learn to live alongside it. Maybe the goal isn’t to force ourselves to feel okay with aging but to build a life that makes it easier to embrace. Surrounding ourselves with people who make life meaningful, consuming things that inspire us instead of filling us with dread, choosing experiences over regrets—these are the things that make getting older feel less like a loss and more like something to hold onto.
Because at the end of the day, the real problem isn’t aging itself. It’s waking up one day and realizing we spent so much time fearing it that we forgot to actually live. So maybe the real question isn’t how do we stop being afraid of aging? Maybe it’s how do we make sure the lives we’re living are ones we actually want to grow old in?