Ignorance and rudeness. Decency and a please and thank you cost nothing.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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.
Those who create the doom.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 December 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 197 →
Carl Barât
English musician
Fear and all of its consequences.
The ability to stress me out.
Rafael Nadal
Spanish professional tennis player, 2001–2024
Selfishness and no respect for the others.
More from Zack Polanski
View profile →A Reform government.
Proportional representation.
Doomscrolling on my phone.
Forest Green Rovers, my football team, getting relegated.
I get trolled on a daily basis so it probably involved my teeth, but that was until I learned to love my teeth.
Catching Covid. I don’t think any of us know what we’re messing with still to this day.
More on values & belief
- Which living person do you most admire, and why? 407 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
Jon Sopel, Rory Stewart, Mike Wallace, Kellie Maloney, Clive Myrie, Barack Obama
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