Surgeons be like:

Self-fulfillment, self-expression, following oneself, and knowing oneself... all have a deep underlying flaw:

The self itself either doesn't exist or, at the very least, changes so much during one's life that there is barely anything substantially stable or even recognizable enough to be called 'Self' that can be fulfilled, expressed, known, or followed.

This criticism also extends to the concept of «authenticity» if we define it as "the honest expression of one's self"

So long as they remain ungrounded, words corrode and distort reality, moving our understanding farther and farther away from the world of concrete existence. As we attempt to construct more and more abstract systems out of our language, we produce fantasy worlds that become more and more discon-nected from the “truth.”

- Laughing at Nothing

.

.

Bloom,Taylor, and Novak seem to think that Americans have unwittingly stumbled into nihilism, rather than actively choosing it. In our enthusiasm for equality, individual freedom, and self-fulfillment, we have fallen prey to a form of soft-relativism that has finally manifested itself as a lack of confidence in any sort of assertion about the rightness or wrongness of values. As cultural fragmentation has progressed, these writers feel, the ability of Americans to come together in order to exercise their collective, political will has been eroded.

- Laughing at Nothing

“Human society is a trial: thus I teach it—a long trial; and what it tries to find is the commander.”

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra

— Euthyphro, by Plato

Euthyphro:
But, Socrates, I do not know how to say what I mean. For whatever statement we advance, somehow or other it moves about and won't stay where we put it.

Socrates:
But is everything that is right also holy? Or is all which is holy right, and not all which is right holy, but part of it holy and part something else?

Euthyphro:
I can't follow you, Socrates.