How to make difficult life decisions, as told by Buzzfeed
It’s hard for me to pinpoint the moment when I started taking my BuzzFeed quiz results a little ‘too’ seriously. I’m guessing it was sometime around when the quiz “What City Should You Actually Live In?” spread like wildfire on Facebook. I spotted the quiz on my newsfeed, took it, and immediately posted my results: I had got Portland, which, coincidentally, is the dream.
In high school, I was fixated on this YA book called Paranoid Park. There were a lot of components to the book that made it such an inspirational read for me: what I perceived to be an innovative plotline, the story’s format and the tone used to convey the complexity of the protagonist, the author’s writing style and, of course, the detailed description of the setting: the lively yet solemn streets of downtown Portland.
Portland was always the dream that seemed “far out of reach” for someone like me. Having grown up on the East coast, I couldn’t see myself actually making the move…nor did I think I could afford it.
But sometime in January I took that quiz, got a result that I actually wanted and from there, started taking more quizzes, so I would get more results that I liked, or that might help me get-to-know my ever-evolving self a little bit better.
Some of my quiz results cleared-up some of the uncertainty I had felt about some of the big life decisions I’ll be expected to make after graduation next May. Quizzes such as, “What Career Should You Actually Have” confirmed that I should be a writer, not a professor, which (admittedly) motivated me to take my writing a little more seriously, or that if I chose to get my Ph.D., I should do so in Comparative Literature. These were all viable questions I have been obsessing over for a while now. I have already accepted the “17 Realities of Getting A Job After Graduating College,” particularly the first one:
Also, number 14 from the list:
In January, Summer Anne Burton, the managing editorial director at BuzzFeed spoke with the Huffington Post about the company’s quizzical success: “I think our most successful quizzes are mostly built so that the results feel personal and that you can relate to them. The answers genuinely correspond to the results.”
Comically enough, I’ve used these enigmatic personality quizzes as a pro-active launching point for making difficult decisions about my future. These quizzes are embedded in a series of millennial-driven trends in news, entertainment, TV, music… While I don’t recommend relying ‘too’ heavily on the results of your BuzzFeed quizzes, there’s no harm in finding out what kind of dog you are!
Because with BuzzFeed, at least the possibilities are optimistic!
