This kind of articles have weak metaphysical grounding, that's why there's room for so many "yes, but"s after them: "be yourself" <=> yes, but not if you are a

This kind of articles have weak metaphysical grounding, that's why there's room for so many "yes, but"s after them: "be yourself" <=> yes, but not if you are a blonde depressed suicidal addict. Consider the first sentence, a rhetorical question: "Have you ever doubted yourself?"—who is this you so promptly assumed. If giving advice meant to impact the entire present and future life of an agent, one should at least wrestle a bit with the plethora of concepts taken for granted, unless one is writing another Dictionary of Received Ideas [1]. In this aspect, you doubting you, perhaps the perspective from Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence is more luminating: of course you would doubt yourself because in actuality there is a you_1 who doubts you_2 and currently you_1 is overpowering you_2 in the vote of all the other yous. Maybe you don't have an inner critic, maybe you have 999 inner critics. In this light, a question such as "have you ever doubted yourself" would look more like "why is the current you still the dominant aspect, still winning the vote of all the other yous, of who/how you could be in the space of all the yous". [1] "Metaphysics. Laugh it to scorn: proof of your superior intellect." https://archive.org/details/gustave-flaubert-dictionary-of-accepted-ideas-barzun/page/n47/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/gustave-flaubert-dictionary-of-a...