Verified by 
Key points
- Those who perceive everything as tests tend to feel like they're on permanent probation.
- Difficulties endured while learning to perform basic skills might spur lasting anxiety around "tests."
- This worldview isn't unique to childish adults but is pervasive among them.
Does every conversation feel to you like yet another test? Before it starts, can you already half-imagine nano-cameras surveying your face and body, broadcasting each button, blink, and vowel as sirens scream: Awkward! Rude! Ineloquent!
Does every chore, meal, meetup, text, and work shift hover like a quiz, audition, or exam designed to measure your intelligence, charisma, and right to exist? And until you discern your "score"—by how others react or some gut feeling—everything just... stops?
Do your joy and sorrow depend on whatever colleague, doctor, partner, stranger, viewer, friend, or algorithm seems to stage your latest test? Do you wonder: Dare I even go outside today, say anything, keep that appointment, click that link? Will I "pass" or "fail"—according to whom? Will failure leave me friendless, jobless, legless, laughed-at, dead?
This pain, this constant suspense, this clenching sense of competition, expectation, hesitation, preparation, panic, and subsequent poison-pronged regret haunts countless people. And it dominates the lives of childish adults.
It steals our senses of self and safety and renders us hypervigilant.
Perceiving everything as tests transforms our every word and gesture, every what-shirt-should-I-wear, into a start/stop series of suspended animations as we await praise or punishment from without or within.
This isn't "test anxiety," as defined by researchers who apply that term to students fearing actual exams. By contrast, our distress is an entire worldview by which we perceive normal daily activities as tests.
But why? What makes us place ourselves on permanent probation, posing for imaginary closeups—maybe mugshots—while skating on fictional thin ice and envying whoever barges boldly through their days?
Perceiving everything as tests is arguably narcissistic. Some would call it main-character syndrome soundtracked by one of two mantras: I will fail this test as always, or I'll ace it, a**holes! Get outta my way!
Both mantras, self-hating and self-adoring, sustain our suspense. A moment never means as much to us as its "results."
For instance: A neighbor told me he'd bought a sailboat. I asked where and why, but not its name. So fail.
I might—but might not—clean the oven. Fail.
Someone else who—as I do—perceives everything as tests but has high self-esteem might stride into a gym and mistake every passing glance for lust or envy. At a family singalong, they might belt operatically, expecting wild applause.
We're both delusional.
Perceiving everything as tests, we deny ourselves agency, authority, strength, and security.
And what does that resemble?
Infancy.
Actual infancy is a series of real tests. Transitioning from utter helplessness to self-determination, human children learn, mainly through guided practice, how to walk, talk, feed themselves, use toilets, and be nice.
But sometimes, this misfires. Something about how those tests did or didn't happen in our lives rendered some of us anxious, untaught, and stuck.
Some of us became too aware of being watched. We felt constantly monitored and judged, even when we were alone.
Some of us became fixated on failure or success. We craved praise more than sunlight and dreaded our watchers' angst and rage.
Physical circumstances kept some of us from performing certain tests. For instance, I was born with hip dysplasia, and I could neither stand nor walk before being fitted with a steel brace.
Some of us went unsupervised, unwatched, ignored, thus unaware of what to learn, from whom, or when or how—later thinking ourselves innately ignorant, incompetent, and left behind.
Suffering our first tests, anxiety, and sometimes even trauma programmed into our bodies and minds, ten million future flashbacks. Now, we chronically replay those past moments in which we felt observed, incompetent, unproven, and incomplete.
Studies link test anxiety with lower test scores in afflicted students because anxiety hinders the brain's ability to find and use stored information. As such, our version of text anxiety harms our mental agility during those daily drives, dates, dialogues, and bathroom breaks that we perceive as tests.
So, can we cut that flashback loop? Can we convince ourselves, even a bit, that our endless suspense is mainly malware?
Facebook image: Olena Yakobchuk/Shutterstock
