Priorities in Life

As most of my college readers will know, Facebook has recently allowed users to design "applications," little program-like things that can be embedded in anyone's Facebook account. I have mixed feelings about them--there are a small number of special tools that I'm glad to have, but many people have added the things willy-nilly and turned their Facebook pages into ugly, disorganized messes that serve to sharply remind me why I'm not on MySpace.

With that bit of background, I've recently encountered a "quizes" application that has you answer a short list of questions and then tells you, in percentage form, how similar your answers are to those of your friends. One such quiz is called "priorities in life" and asks you to rank the following ten things in order of importance to you:

love
money
friendship
being single
being married
having a house
having a car
work
children
family

When I just say the title of this quiz, I was curious to take it. When I saw the choices, though, I decided against, because honestly I can't see a person's interest in these things telling me much about them. They're the sort of things that have a sort of moderate importance to me that is roughly equal across the board, too close to rank meaningfully.

Evidently, the creator of the quiz things otherwise. The natural inference is that he or she sees these things as the obvious candidates for what's important in life, and would have a hard time seeing why anyone might want to list other things. Alternatively, the creator might have several things he or she would rank higher, but considers those ten the only sufficiently universal ones to put in a quiz like this.

I find this significant because I suspect that the creator of the application is not totally out of touch with the thinking of the average American, providing fuel for my wonderings about how the average American thinks. Unfortunately, it tends to confirm Vjack's comment...