#clay skipper

[eleanorhamor]

[newstfionline]

This Is What Happened When I Asked My Friends to Rate Me

By Clay Skipper, GQ, July 26, 2018

We’re all constantly being judged and rated these days--or else judging and rating other people (Uber drivers, Tinder dates). But what if we opened ourselves up and tried to find out what all these ratings really say about us? Clay Skipper took the ultimate personal-ratings challenge.

My existential spiral began with Uber. It recently made its passenger ratings more easily accessible., I couldn’t help myself. I opened the app as fast as I could, clicked the three bars in the corner, and voilà: 4.74.

Which, out of 5, should be pretty good! But considering I’ve taken more than 320 rides, this meant I’d received more than my fair share of 4s--maybe even a few 3s. I decided I would prove Uber’s algorithm had made a mistake by tracking down other forms of affirmation.

My solution? A Google survey. I created 11 categories--including “Kindness,” “Personal Style,” and “How Likely Are You to Recommend This Product (Me) to a Friend?”--to be rated from 1 to 10. I tacked on a write-in question at the end, “What’s one thing about me that drives you nuts?” I e-mailed it to nearly 40 of my closest friends and relatives--and a few ex-girlfriends, for objectivity’s sake. Then I waited.

The surveys started coming in. One person gave me all 10s and wrote that the thing about me that drove him or her nuts was “honestly, that you’re not here with me right now!” Was that a new girlfriend…or my mom? Someone else said my “lack of self-love” was my most annoying trait. The last comment was “Don’t think so much,” which was a funny thing to read as I began furiously trying to figure out which of my “friends” gave me a 1 on “Emotional Stability” (honestly: not wrong) and which one thought I didn’t “try very hard to empathize with women.”

In the end, 32 people filled out the form, giving me a composite score of…7.88.

My initial response was insecurity--which then manifested as defensiveness, just like when I first saw my Uber rating. But once I got past the blows to my ego, the criticism, though it stung, was actually pretty useful. I figured out who wrote the response about my lack of empathy for women and asked her how I could be better at that. I resolved to stop flaking on plans so much when I saw my pitiful reliability score (7.41). I tried to get out of my head and into the world, to stop being so self-absorbed.

If the future consists of walking on digital eggshells, maybe the guard against that is to be more vulnerable with the people we do know. The benefits of opening ourselves up to criticism could offset the very ways in which technology is making us more superficial. I’d like to think that if this survey did anything--outside of improving my therapist’s job security--it helped me be a better human, even if just marginally so.

And okay, you probably shouldn’t send out a survey asking your friends to rate you. But maybe at least ask them what you do that drives them crazy or how you could be better.

[bob-belcher]

[nowayzinedine]

It felt like it never happened at all.