Are we becoming too dependent on tests?

Why we don’t always need answers

With the increasing popularity of tests and quizzes, both for entertainment and scientific purposes, there seems to be a quantitative answer for almost everything in life. You can easily find quizzes for anything on websites like BuzzFeed or Cosmopolitan answering questions like “Is he the one?”, “Are you in the right career?”, or “Are you TRULY happy?”

Why do we take these tests? Are we obsessed with needing external answers? Have we become dependent on these quizzes to tell us who we are, what we feel, and what we should do? Have we stopped living our own lives and finding things out for ourselves? It would seem that we as a society have started to treat these various quizzes as sort of a palm reader or psychic reading- you know they might be wrong, but you can’t help but wonder if there may be some truth to them.

We are constantly bombarded by information and media telling us what we should do that we have become afraid to take risks and learn about life “the hard way”. I am graduating at the end of this semester and, as such, I have recently been spending a lot of time thinking about what I should do with my life. I recently found myself taking a “What career should you have?” quiz in a momentary lapse of judgement/desperate attempt for some unbiased insight. But as I was answering the questions, I had a sudden realization that I don’t want this quiz to tell me what it thinks I should be. I want to find out for myself. I want to try different things and make mistakes and stumble around aimlessly until I hopefully fall upon a career that I enjoy. Even though I probably would not have taken the results of that career quiz very seriously, I still felt like I needed to stop looking for answers and just live.

I think this is something that we forget to do when we are surrounded by so much media and tests advertising that they have the answers for us and they will tell us what we should do. Society has become conditioned to believe that everything can be evaluated and quantified and that there is always an answer. I think this is leading to a society that is stressed about making the right decision or getting the right answer, when there may be multiple right decisions or answers. Or even if you make the “wrong” decision, it’s a part of the experience of life to learn from that choice. But we have become so afraid to take risks that I think it’s severely damaging our quality of life. Most of these quizzes are surely created for entertainment purposes, so we need to be careful and remind ourselves that the methodology is probably sketchy at best. Otherwise, the vast amount of these trivial tests and an increasing dependence on answers will promote a stressed out, anxious society that is scared of making mistakes.

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