Comment by lo_zamoyski

> stay true to yourself

Herd mentality is dreadful, but given how fickle and flawed the self is, this, too, can be terrible advice. There is a reason why Shakespeare had Polonius, a total buffoon, give the "to thine own self be true" speech in Hamlet. But our English departments have, for the most part, completely misread this passage, and, in doing so, revealed their basic worldview and moral orientation.

To borrow from Augustine, a man has really only one fundamental choice to make in life. Either he conforms himself and his desires to the truth, or he conforms the "truth" to himself and his desires. Both paths will entail suffering, but it is the latter that leads to misery. Self-absorption is the very prison that produced your problems in the first place. As Zizek would say, you just discover a lot of shit. Only the first one leads to authentic freedom. The self is not the source of truth, but can be its reflection. That is only possible if you turn away from the self and toward the truth.

So I would say: stay true to the truth. Anything else is a dead end.