According to famed thinker U.G. Krishnamurti, self-discovery is a fool's game because there is ultimately no self to discover. From a certain perspective, this is absolutely true.
What is the "self" anyways? Your thoughts and feelings? Your ideas, hopes and dreams? A collection of bones, muscle tissue and brain activity? All of these things are temporary in nature and dependent on context, even ignoring the inevitability of death.
Take for example a young man who wants to grow up to be a rock star. He may follow this dream for some years before realizing that all he really wants is to play the guitar for fun, and could he even follow that hope if somebody else hadn't invented the guitar? Perhaps he just likes music and wants to create it and would have picked up another instrument if not for the guitar. So what if he loses his hearing?
Even your body will completely regenerate itself every so many years. Cells will die and be replaced by new ones and you will indeed be a different person in ten years than you are today.
Maybe the self is nothing but the five senses. Maybe the self is just the nervous system, the eyes and ears and nose that can enjoy witnessing a beautiful sunset over the beach, and the brain to process such beauty.
U.G. Krishnamurti in fact criticizes the very idea of the mind, insisting that there is not an individual mind but a world mind that we all share. In a sense, this matches up with Jungian psychology, the collection unconscious. So much of who you are is defined by the times you live in. Notions of honor and courage vary from culture to culture, time to time. Even physical beauty, intelligence and strength are gauged differently by almost every generation.
As U.G. puts it: many people go off in search of themselves and find nothing because there is no self to find.
Whether you agree or disagree with U.G.'s take on the issue of identity is your own call to make. How you define your identity and how you define yourself is nobody's decision but yours to make.
An issue that many people face is that they do not know themselves because they have never been tested. They do not know themselves because there is so little yet to know. Young people who have never been through a really rough breakup, people who have never climbed a mountain, built a house, gone hitch hiking or been lost in the woods, these are people who will have a hard time putting their finger on who, exactly, they are simply because there's so little for them to go on.
Sometimes it's not so much a matter of finding yourself as inventing yourself, building yourself from the ground up. The most common definition of self includes a long list of personal triumphs and tragedies, failures and successes, pleasures and pains, and you don't attain these things strictly through meditation and reading and spiritual retreats. You attain these things through the act of living.
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Trained by such luminaries as Kay Adams, Christina Baldwin, Stephanie Dowrick, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Carol Pearson Joanne uses expressive writing & story-telling as a developmental vehicle, offering a variety of imaginative and engaging writing workshops. See http://www.therapeuticwritingnetwork.com and http://www.c-change.info for details.
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