Enough with the constant smiling.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A verbatim standing question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A questionnaire, documented across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Lack of empathy.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 April 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 197 →Superiority. I shrink when I’m around people who act superior, whether it’s due to authority or intellect. I almost become mute.
When they don’t tell the truth.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist and screenwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2017
The urge to be unpleasant to waitstaff in restaurants.
More from Mark Bonnar
View profile →Instead of saying, “I tripped up”, you have to use the words, “I had a fall.”
That we’re all going to hell in a handcart and Trump is driving.
If it scares you, do it.
I cry if one of the kids says something profound without knowing it; I cry at adverts; I cry at Strictly Come Dancing.
I did an interview years ago and, after it finished, I made some passing comment about sex getting better as you get older – and they used that as the headline. The day the paper came out, I was in a restaurant with the family when a woman on the table next to me leaned over and said, in a sultry voice, “I read your article this morning.”
Chaotic, daft and loving.
More on values & belief
- Which living person do you most admire, and why? 406 answers
- What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong? 79 answers
- What are you unwilling to optimise? 30 answers
- What have you come to understand about what it means to be human? 14 answers
- What is the most overrated virtue? 10 answers
- What do you need to believe in order to get through the day? 9 answers
Also answered this
Kellie Maloney, Johannes Radebe, Penny Lancaster, Helen Skelton, Christine Baranski, Bryan Adams
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All values & belief questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject