title: "What Are You: What Does the Sum of Your Actions Mean?" date: "2026-07-19" category: "life-growth" author: "Zhigeng"

What Are You: What Does the Sum of Your Actions Mean?

Yesterday, this publication posted Who Are You: What Does the Sum of All Social Relations Mean?, which used the examples of wolf children, the euthanasia of 104-year-old ecologist David Goodall, and the self-forgetting of Alzheimer's patients to elaborate on my understanding of the social dimension within the dual attributes of human nature (the biological and the social)—an understanding grounded in Marx's philosophical thesis that the human essence is the sum of social relations.

Today, let us switch to Sartre's perspective and ask: what are you?

I. Sartre's Thesis

October 1945, two months after the end of World War II, Paris.

Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a public lecture at the Club Maintenant. The hall was packed to overflowing; some people fainted from the crush. This lecture, published the following year as Existentialism Is a Humanism, became one of the most famous philosophical texts of the twentieth century.

In this lecture, Sartre articulated a thesis that echoes Marx's assertion from afar:

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. [1]

And what, then, is that thing?

Sartre said: Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life. [2]

These two formulations share a similar grammatical structure—you are = the sum of your ______—but point in different directions.

Marx's thesis: you are the sum of all your social relations. The implicit emphasis is on where you are situated—these relations are, to a large extent, a matter of the lottery of birth; they precede you and do not depend on you. Which family, which country, which era you were born into is not your choice. These factory settings determine your starting point and most of the path that follows.

Sartre's thesis: you are the sum of the actions you take. The emphasis is on what you do—these actions are chosen by you, done by you, and you are responsible for them. Here, we see more agency and autonomy—the art of leveling up through adversity.

Marx tells you where you come from—your essence is determined by the network of social relations into which you are embedded. Sartre tells you where you can go—your essence is continuously created and rewritten by your actions.

These two theses are complementary: Marx explains the givenness of the human—we are indeed not blank slates; we are thrown into specific social relations at birth. Sartre explains human agency—within these given relations, the individual, through their own actions, continuously constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs who I am.

This is how action becomes, and also accomplishes, human essence.

II. Growth: Factory Settings and Self-Rewriting

Every person is born with a set of factory settings: their parents' occupations, the family's economic situation, the city they are in, the era they inhabit, their innate intellectual level, their physical condition. None of these were chosen by you, yet they largely determine your starting point.

In Marx's framework, these are your initial social relations—the web into which you were embedded at birth.

According to Sartre's claim: factory settings determine the starting point, not the destination.

An extreme example is that of ex-offenders. A person commits a crime, is sentenced, and goes to prison—in that moment, their social relations undergo a drastic change: they lose their job, their spouse may leave, friends become distant, and the social label becomes criminal. This person's self in the sense of social relations is substantially altered.

But after release? Every choice they make—whether to seek work or not, whether to repair family relationships or remain estranged, whether to learn new skills or return to old ways—is reconstructing their social relations. If they persist in making constructive choices, ten years later they may have rebuilt an entire set of social relations: a new professional identity, repaired family ties, a new social role.

Their essence has been rewritten by their own actions.

The reverse holds as well. A person with excellent factory settings—privileged family, elite education, high-paying job—if they continuously make poor choices, deceiving, betraying, self-destructing... their social relations will snap one by one, and the person they once were will vanish too.

The core meaning of growth is this: social relations are not static; they are a dynamic system continuously created and transformed by individual action. The you of today is the result of all your actions up until today. The you of tomorrow depends on what you do tomorrow.

III. Responsibility: Every Stroke Sculpts

From the premise that the human is the sum of their actions, Sartre derives a conclusion of immense weight—responsibility.

If who you are is not predetermined by nature or imposed by others, but is constituted by your own actions, then you have no excuses. You cannot say, I did this because of my background. You cannot say, I became this way because circumstances forced me. You cannot say, everyone else does it. Because for every action, the power of choice lies in your hands.

Sartre's logical argument:

The human is free—you always have the freedom to choose your actions (even in the most extreme circumstances, you can at least choose your attitude toward the situation).
Your actions constitute who you are.
You bear full responsibility for who you are.

This is not moralizing but logical deduction: human essence = the sum of actions.

Sartre goes one step further: you bear responsibility for all of humanity. Because when you choose to do something, you are effectively saying, A person in this situation should act this way. Through your actions, you are legislating for all of humanity.

When you choose to lie, you are saying, People may lie when necessary. When you choose honesty, you are saying, People ought to be honest.

Every action, while constructing who you are, simultaneously defines what you believe a human should be.

Sartre emphasizes responsibility in order to block the most common form of self-deception: shifting responsibility onto my nature is just this way or circumstances left me no choice.

You can cite many reasons for why you are the way you are—your childhood, your traumas, your social conditions. Sartre would say: all of these are real, but they are not excuses. They explain where you came from, but they do not determine what you will do. With every new choice you make, you are redrawing a line for yourself. You are always within responsibility.

IV. Backfire: The Consequences of Actions Redefine You

You are the sum of your actions—this statement means that your actions do not merely express who you are; they define who you are. And this process of definition does not always unfold as you expect.

Case: Nixon and Watergate

In the early hours of June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., and were caught on the spot. It was a clumsy burglary. If Nixon's response at the time had been to launch an open investigation and cut ties, the Watergate incident might have been merely a footnote in his presidency.

But the series of actions Nixon chose were: cover up the truth, obstruct justice, and lie. These actions accumulated, ultimately leading to the collapse of all his social relations: Congress betrayed him, the media besieged him, his aides left him, and the people abandoned him.

On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation, becoming the first president in American history to resign.

Nixon did far more in his lifetime than just Watergate—he opened the door to China, ended the Vietnam War, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and advanced civil rights legislation... But his sum of actions included covering up the truth. And this action—not his other achievements—ultimately defined him. Today, when Nixon is mentioned, most people think of the president who lied in Watergate.

This is the backfire of action: every action enters your sum of actions, but not all actions carry equal weight. Certain critical actions acquire disproportionate weight in your sum of actions, becoming the core element that defines you. You cannot control which action will become your label in the future—you can only control yourself so that you never do things that, once done, can never be washed away.

A More Universal Case: Credit Bankruptcy

A person builds credit within a circle over many years—punctual, reliable, trustworthy. All these actions constitute who they are in this circle—a trustworthy person.

Then they do one thing: a serious act of deception.

This single action, within their multi-year accumulated sum of actions, can carry more weight than all their trustworthy acts. Their social relations undergo a qualitative change in that moment: from a trustworthy person to a person who has defrauded others.

This is not a question of fairness; this is human nature. Negative actions carry asymmetric weight in defining who you are. It is like pouring a bottle of ink into a clear river—the whole river turns black.

And this is also a kind of fairness: because you know the cruelty of this rule, you have a responsibility to restrain your own actions.

V. Synthesis of the Two Essays

The previous essay, Who Are You?, presented Marx's thesis: you are the sum of the social relations in which you are situated. This understands the human from the perspective of givenness—you are inescapably situated in a web that precedes your existence.

This essay presents Sartre's thesis: you are the sum of all your actions. This understands the human from the perspective of active creation—every action you take is reweaving this web, redefining who you are.

Placed together, the two essays present a more complete picture:

Your social relations have a set of factory settings—this is the part Marx emphasizes. But these are not fixed. Every action you take adjusts these settings—strengthening some relations, weakening others, severing some, and building new ones... Ultimately, your essence = factory settings times the sum of behavioral choices—the part Sartre expands.

You are not a prisoner of your origins, because your actions can rewrite the relations bestowed by your origins. Nor are you absolutely free, because every action, once taken, enters your sum and can never be removed—just as Nixon could never remove Watergate from his own history.

Marx tells you where you come from; Sartre tells you where you can go—the two theses together enrich our full understanding of human nature: the human is both the product of social relations and the creation of their own actions.

The former is the starting point; the latter is the journey.

The lottery of birth, the factory settings—all the way, leveling up through adversity, falling and rising, winning and losing battles, charging through the gates, ever more valiant despite defeats, dusting off and moving on, I was here, twenty years later and I will be a force to reckon with again... How magnificent, how fascinating...

But I digress...

Next time, more to come...

[1]: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Zhou Xuliang and Tang Yongkuan, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1988, p. 8 [2]: Ibid., p. 20.

Zhigeng Science · July 2026 Trilogy on Human Nature · Part Two