nature vs nurture

what happens when your own principles meet your actual behaviour? which matters most: our essence or our evidence?

I keep a filing system in my head for people. They live in four boxes. Not based on what they did yesterday or how they handled a crisis, but on who they are overall. Their life patterns. Their orientation when you zoom out.

Four boxes, nothing scientific, just my framework for making sense of people, and maybe, to make peace with them. The boxes go like this:

1. Evil in nature, evil in action. The easy ones to spot. These are the people whose core leans toward harm and whose lives reflect it, but not always with awareness. They don’t sit around thinking, I’m evil. They’re simply indifferent. They hurt, exploit, manipulate, neglect, and it doesn’t strike them as something to fight against. They don’t feel the need to change, because their nature and their actions are aligned.

2. Good in nature, good in action. The rare unicorns. The people whose instincts are kind, and whose circumstances allow them to live out that kindness. They help without being asked, they mean what they say, their goodness is both innate and practiced. Their nature and their behavior match, not perfectly, but enough that you trust the alignment.

3. Evil in nature, good in action. The complicated ones. Their core may lean dark, selfish, cruel, with destructive impulses, but instead of surrendering to it, they work against it. Some of them know exactly who they are and want to be different. Others are pushed by their environment into practicing goodness they wouldn’t otherwise choose. Their actions are genuine, but they come from effort, not instinct.

4. Good in nature, evil in action. Maybe the saddest box. People whose hearts lean kind, but whose surroundings or choices drag them elsewhere. Some of them know this and suffer for it. Others don’t even realize their nature is good, because they’ve been swallowed by survival, pressure, bad influences, or learned patterns that calcified over time. They aren’t wired to be destructive, but they end up there anyway. You can sense their softness beneath it all, but they themselves might not.

I think it’s fascinating how often people don’t even know which box they’re in. Some convince themselves they’re good because their actions look good, even if their nature rots underneath. Others punish themselves for being “bad” when their circumstances have betrayed an otherwise soft core. Maybe nobody ever sees themselves clearly.

I don’t want this to read as if people flip between boxes depending on the day or a single decision. The boxes aren’t snapshots, they’re the sum of essence and history. Because most people will sometimes act out of character. A good-in-nature person might lash out, and an evil-in-nature person might surprise you with tenderness.

I carry these boxes with me like a lens, and sometimes I wonder what it does to me. Watching, weighing, scanning. It can be exhausting. I don’t just notice who people are, I measure them. Every kindness, every slight, every hesitation gets filed away, nudging someone closer to one box or another. There’s a strange protective comfort in it, but also a weight, as if keeping track of the world’s moral ledger is my personal responsibility. And sometimes, I’m afraid it makes me brittle, suspicious, or endlessly hesitant to trust.

When I think of people this way, the real challenge isn’t spotting the extremes. The truly good and the truly bad are easy. It’s the greys — the good natures living badly, the bad natures living well — that make life complicated. The people whose nature and action are misaligned pull at you in ways extremes never could. I’ve felt admiration for someone who I knew had a darkness at their core, only to watch them make choices that could hurt people I care about. I’ve felt frustration, even revulsion, toward someone whose intentions were pure, whose heart was soft, but whose decisions wreaked havoc. They confuse you, tug at your empathy, blur your boundaries, and make you question whether morality lives in essence or in evidence.

On one hand, actions feel undeniable. If someone consistently harms, cheats, lies, abuses, then their “good heart” doesn’t matter much. You can’t hug someone’s inner softness when their choices are destroying everything around them. At some point, the world doesn’t care what you meant to be, it only registers the wake you leave behind. History is written in deeds, not intentions. A person could die believing themselves “good in nature” while the rest of us carry the scars of their actions.

But on the other hand, nature is what makes me hesitate. Because action alone doesn’t tell the whole story. People act from fear, survival, pressure, trauma. Some people live entire lives acting out of character, swallowed by environments that don’t reflect who they are at their core. And I can’t bring myself to erase the softness I sense underneath. If someone’s instinct is kindness, even if it never fully got the chance to breathe, that matters to me. Their nature might not redeem their damage, but it complicates the judgment.

It’s a paradox: nature without action is invisible, but action without nature can feel hollow. A bad person doing good can change lives; a good person doing bad can ruin them. So which one carries more weight, the purity of the soul, or the evidence of the life lived?

I think the only honest answer is that it depends on who’s asking. Victims will always privilege actions. Friends, lovers, people who saw the good flicker in you, they might privilege nature. History, almost always remembers action. It doesn’t care about intention, it cares about impact. You could live your whole life with a soft heart, yet be remembered for the harm you couldn’t prevent or the kindness that never reached the light. And you? You’re left somewhere in between, trying to reconcile who someone is with what they’ve done, and who you want them to be with who they actually are.

Time is the ultimate judge of these boxes. Patterns take years to reveal themselves. I’ve watched people I assumed were one thing shift ever so slightly, only to settle into something I didn’t expect. Every decision, every compromise, every lapse or triumph nudges them toward a box. You don’t just meet someone once, you watch history being written in real time, and you’re a reluctant witness to the sum of their choices.

I’ve realized that thinking this way shapes me too. It makes me cautious, self-conscious, analytical. I notice my own inclinations, my own misalignments. I ask myself: is my nature good enough if my actions falter? Does my effort to do right compensate for impulses I can’t fully control? Observing others in this way forces a kind of honesty with yourself, you can’t hide, not from the boxes, not from yourself.

Eventually, we all settle into one box. The question is just whether it’s the one we thought we deserved. Which means the scariest truth might be this: the box you actually live in is chosen less by you, and more by everyone watching.

If I’m honest, I’ve always leaned toward judging people by their nature. I don’t mean I excuse the harm or good they do. I’ve cut people off, I’ve walked away, I’ve protected myself, but when I’m sorting through how I feel about someone, I can’t stop myself from looking for their softness. I look for the crack in their armor that tells me who they really are. It’s why I’ll still defend someone long after they’ve proven they’re capable of hurting me. I can feel their heart beating underneath it all, even if they’ve buried it so deep that they can’t reach it themselves.

It makes me forgiving to the point of foolishness. I tell myself it’s empathy, but sometimes I wonder if it’s just vanity, the belief that I can see people more clearly than they see themselves (palmas para o alecrim dourado),¹ that I can tell which box they belong in, even when their life points the other way. I get attached to people’s potential, as if who they could be should weigh as much as who they’ve shown themselves to be.

But then I think: isn’t that what I want for myself? For people to read me generously, to see my intentions when my actions fall short? To believe I’m good, even when I’ve acted badly? To treat my nature as a north star, even if my map hasn’t always followed it?

That’s the uncomfortable mirror of it all. The way you judge others is usually the way you hope to be judged. And maybe that’s what this is all about: the grace we hope for ourselves. To be seen for our nature, not just our record.

1. In Portuguese, “palmas para o alecrim dourado” literally means “applause for the golden rosemary.” Calling someone “alecrim dourado” (golden rosemary) is a sarcastic way of saying they think they’re special, unique, or above others. Basically me calling myself a golden child who thinks she can see everyone’s soul better than they can. Yeah, vanity.