A dog bounding through the grass on a summer’s day chasing a squirrel.
What does love feel like?
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
What are you still hoping to finish?
Death & what remains
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When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
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Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this exact standing prompt.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
Matt Wordsworth, Lateline, ABC News, 11 July 2016 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 228 →Like a warm velvet glove.
Melissa McCarthy
American actress
There is an ease to it. It’s not all butterflies and sky rockets, it’s more like absolute comfort.
Charlotte Church
Welsh singer-songwriter and actress
A shimmering bioluminescence that lights up each cell.
More from Alain de Botton
View profile →failure. I dream of chapters I haven't written and things that I forgot to say in books I wrote three or seven years ago.
Impatience with difficult projects: panicking and giving up too quickly.
To make www.theschooloflife.com a global brand (to open a branch in Australia). To make www.living-architecture.co.uk flourish. To write good books.
The summer just after finishing How Proust Can Change Your Life.
The architect Peter Zumthor, for the baths at Vals in Switzerland.
I'd take a course in bread-making and open a small bakery.
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Richard Ford, Jia Tolentino, Sandi Toksvig, Adam Kay, Alan Cumming, Mary McCartney
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