Why “We Are Our Choices” Is a Trap

Someone dropped a Jean-Paul Sartre quote on my feed:
“We are our choices.”

It almost tripped me up. Almost.

Because on the surface, it sounds empowering. There’s a seductive logic to it. You’re the architect of your life. You choose your path. You’re not shaped by circumstances, you shape them. Every fork in the road, every yes and no, every turn – all of it supposedly adds up to who you are.

It sounds good. Until it doesn’t.

Because here’s where that quote collapses under its own weight:
It assumes every choice is made with perfect clarity and emotional stability.
It assumes our decisions come from some pure, unshakable core of identity.

But most choices aren’t made that way.

A lot of choices come from fear.
From survival mode.
From nerves, not nature.
From that moment when your body reacts faster than your brain.
From exhaustion when you don’t have the bandwidth to think past the next thirty seconds.

And when a quote like “We are our choices” is applied to moments like that… it turns unfair fast.

It stops describing your character and starts describing your adrenaline. It mistakes reaction for identity. It freezes you in a snapshot of who you were under pressure and calls that your essence.

And that’s where the whole philosophy cracks.

Because what about the choices you made in a split second, the ones with consequences you never intended?
What about the years you chose stability over growth because you didn’t know any different?
What about the times you chose silence because you genuinely didn’t feel safe speaking?
What about the choices you didn’t even know were choices until later?

Some philosophers get too clever sometimes.
They build these elegant little statements that sound profound in a lecture hall, but fall apart the second they brush up against real human messiness. Most of their ‘truths’ don’t survive contact with actual life.

Here’s the truth they miss:

You’re not your choices.
You’re the person learning from them.
You’re the person who can look back and say, “That wasn’t who I want to be,” and then change course.
You’re the capacity to choose differently next time.
You’re not the sum of your past decisions.
You’re the movement between them.

So yes, the quote almost got me. Almost.
For a moment, it made me feel like one choice – or a cluster of them – had locked me into being a certain kind of person.

But I’m not locked in.
Neither are you.

We’re still choosing.
Still learning.
Still becoming someone who won’t fit inside a fortune-cookie phrase.