Occasionally one comes across a haunting local newspaper report about how someone in their 80s lay dead and undiscovered for three weeks until the postman smelled something rotten wafting through the letterbox and looked in to see the decomposing late occupant partially eaten by their 17 cats.

These stories sum up our fears of being forgotten by colleagues, abandoned by our siblings, ignored by our children, outliving our friends, being divorced or widowed and never finding love again. Of being outpaced by history and time and culture, all of which move on without us until we feel that we’re from a different age. Of living a marginalised, invisible and reduced life in which there is no scope for human connection.

But that is the worst case scenario. So often when we are afraid of ending up alone, it’s not because we fear solitude but because we fear the stereotypes and stigma of being the person who ended up alone. Perhaps the woman or man with 17 cats had a super time and positively relished being eaten by their beloved moggies when they died, devoured like a feline Eucharist. Perhaps that chicly austere solo figure you wonder about as she’s doing her groceries is actually Joan Didion.

Solitude can give you something that no human relationship can: a connection to the divine. It’s only when alone, in silence and offline that I have the most profound sense of (secular) vocation; the richest insight when reading or writing, the deepest concentration, the clearest intuition. Perhaps being alone, even ending up alone in the long term, is exactly what’s needed to create work of real meaning, whether that is an artistic project or scientific research, theoretical physics or philosophical hypothesis.

There are many things worse than turning into a jolly cat lady who shops with a nice sturdy trolley with thin white wheels and a fold-over plastic flap. Cat lady may be a weirdo to those who haven’t reached her, um, level of self-actualisation, but she’s authentic, she’s happy and she doesn’t care what other people think.

Being a happy solo weirdo is a thousand times better than being a trophy wife, a live-in grandad who always feels as if he’s underfoot, a downtrodden emotional punchbag mother, the groovy uncle who never grew up and still lives in a houseshare, a dutiful and uncomplaining daughter, the brother who’s always there to pick up the slack, the woman who anyone can call when they want some free labour.

Platonic friendship, not sexual love, is the great joy of life, and making friends is a skill to be nurtured. Nothing in the world is lonelier than being in a bad relationship or at the “heart” of a family that treats you like dirt, or trapped in a home or a marriage where you can’t be yourself and you feel like you’re living a lie.

We have an ageing population of radicals redefining what is possible as we grow older. They are passionate, worldly people who are as politically fiery as ever - the anti-nuclear activists, the equality and justice protesters, the union members, the travellers, the first generation to kick back against the unspoken requirement to marry and put up and shut up. They are good at making friends and interested in the world. None of that changes just because they’re older. Are any of these people or their daughters and sons going to end up alone, grey, bland, silent, cowed? Never.

But not everyone will march against war or pocket their retirement money and hike around the world working through their bucket list. There’s an old people’s home near my house that has the creepy slogan, “A friend to the elderly.”

One way to ensure that nobody ends up alone in a place like that is to challenge a horrifically ageist Anglo-American culture that sees older people as worthless, that prizes the nuclear family over the extended family and shoves older people out of sight in “retirement communities” as if they are something to be ashamed of. It doesn’t happen in India, Italy, Latin America, southern Africa, in the far east or east Asia. In these places, age confers respect. People who are now in their 60s and 70s are campaigning for dignity for older people, to ensure that nobody ends up destitute, represented as a figure of fun or treated like an irritating and distasteful hindrance to society. That will take a deep cultural change, but you won’t end up alone if you’re busy trying to change the world.

Being afraid of ending up alone will propel you into ensuring it never happens. If you’re anywhere from your 30s to your 70s and you have your health and some pocket money and free time and you’re typing “Will I end up alone?” into Google, join a meetup group, or sign up for a course, or become a charity volunteer, or anything at all that you’re interested in.

Anything which takes you up and out of yourself, which focuses the mind on learning something new, creating something of beauty or helping others reform the way you see both your own potential and your own fate relative to others. There’s always someone in the world who needs and wants your help, your understanding, your wisdom or your talent, and your own self-pity and fear just place a barrier between them and you.

Let me close with some advice given to me by the late Joan Rivers who ended up on a glittering stage by herself, but not alone, having all her experiences, achievements and colleagues standing alongside her. “Tell me something,” she said. “Are you close to your mother? Oh you are? Oh that’s marvellous. Well let me tell you, there is a God. It’s all gonna work out, I promise. Darling, it’s all just going to be completely faaaaabulous.”

So there are two equally happy answers to this question. First, you will not end up alone. Your own terror of doing so will guarantee that you do everything that is wholesome and constructive in order to make sure it doesn’t happen, and you will end your days surrounded by friends and children and your chosen life-partner in an enormous family home. Second: you will end up alone, yet never lonely, strong in your solitude yet wholly connected to the wider world, still learning, living and giving, and it’ll be marvellous.