Climate change.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Going back to addiction.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 January 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 266 →Lack of purpose.
Stephen Fry
Actor, writer and broadcaster
Being found out.
Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
Sometimes, it is the possibility of loneliness. Other times, it is the possibility of never being alone, having no privacy, being under the control of another.
More from Paul Merson
View profile →On holiday in Orlando with my wife, Kate, and kids just before lockdown. I wasn’t drinking or gambling. I was so happy, so at peace with myself – I’d been searching for that for many a year.
Thirty-odd years ago I bought a black pinstripe suit which I thought was £900. But when I went to pay that was just the jacket – the trousers and waistcoat were extra. I didn’t have the balls to put anything back. I dread to think how much it cost me in the end.
That materialistic things will not make you happy.
Walsall fans. I wanted to be a good manager but I was really bad with drink and gambling at the time. I should have done better.
For me, love is working through things when it’s not going well.
When you jump out of addiction and look back, things like drink-driving and sitting in crack houses are not good.
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