Painting Your Way To Happiness

We don't make mistakes. We just have happy accidents. – Bob Ross

Background

You cannot be an effective consumer or creator unless you can bravely ask yourself what it is you truly believe in. Who are you really? Acquiring knowledge can give you reference points, but in service to what? How does this fundamentally change you – how does it contribute to authentically answering the question: who am I and what do I believe in?

Thesis

To effectively establish a worldview, one needs to apply the Italian Renaissance painting technique of sfumato: where you soften transitions between colors and tones, creating a smoky, blurred effect without visible lines or borders. I argue that every strongly adopted belief begins constraining the interpretations available afterward. If I commit prematurely, subsequent ideas get filtered through an already hardened worldview. The happy medium is a balanced approach to “shading” across n-dimensional domains.

Argument

Throughout my 2026 journey of self-discovery, with psychotherapy and spiritual counseling, I have been confronting the scary question: who am I and what do I believe in? Strip away the expectations, the laurels, and assumptions – who remains? It reminds me of the Buddhist koan “what did your face look like before your parents were born?”

I’ve asked myself that quite a bit, leading to an almost decade-long journey to documenting and creating my family tree. I have always had a longing for a past I’ve never lived. I was seeking to learn more about my history in order to better understand myself.

Carl Jung argues that through the various generations in which our lives are spawned, that we inherit deep psychic structures and archetypal predispositions that recur across human cultures. Said differently, our subconscious processes things through dreams which can manifest through fairy tales and myths, but while we may not be conscious of what they pertain to, understanding one’s history can be the key to linking their particular interpretation to their historical roots. This only convinced me to double-down and learn more about my history. It led me to reading the national Epics of various civilizations to understand how that psyche matured.

Now, reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, the protagonist, Zarathustra the prophet (Zoroaster), says that we adorn ourselves with the “colors” of knowledge, values, and traditions. Rather than saying we have inherited the values of our American system, or our Greek system because we live in it, the modern intellectuals will wear a global tapestry of many different cultures and civilizations they’ve learned about, claiming to be a more well-rounded, cosmopolitan individual. He asserts that he’s been in the future and he loves it there because of all the potential things that could be created. He then looks back upon the present from this imagined future and pities them for consuming all this knowledge without effectively changing anything about themselves. Even worse, they’ve become a derivative amalgamation of their accepted beliefs without having created something new.

“Alas, where shall I climb now with my longing? From all mountains I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But home I found nowhere; a fugitive am I in all cities and a departure at all gates. Strange and a mockery to me are the men of today to whom my heart recently drew me; and I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children’s land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea: for this I bid my sails search and search. In my children I want to make up for being the child of my fathers – and to all the future, for this today.”

The question I ask myself is: can these two beliefs be reconciled?  I believe they can, and to extend the painting analogy further, I argue it’s through the sfumato technique. Through this technique, Da Vinci gave us the irreplicability of Mona Lisa’s smile. To me, it allows one to independently acquire disparate ideas and procedurally blend them together until the net result is one’s true beliefs – their body of work.

The driving force here would be to adhere to one’s dharma, which is why this process for me has had a deeply spiritual element. Listening to what my body says – being open to where I may be in alignment with the universe. It has led me down very unique paths and novel ideas. More importantly, it's the only antidote to the nausea I have at not having established this body of work yet. It enables me to not know what the final painting will look like, while shamelessly able to continue acquiring more disparate knowledge, and effectively prodding me to think, question, and create more.

Leonardo da Vinci defined sfumato as painting "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke." This is different from just saying “acquire knowledge then connect a bunch of them together.” With sfumato, you specifically apply many extremely thin, translucent layers of oil paint on a dry surface. This method allows me to observe without judgment and formulate a stance without prematurely converting that stance into an identity. More importantly, sfumato isn’t merely connecting ideas. Each idea remains partially translucent, allowing it to interact with several other ideas simultaneously until previously invisible relationships emerge.

So what does this mean in practice? I’ve created the following system so far (and plan to update it continually), but it’s been working so far:

• Engage with the learning material through essay prompts.
• Map the ideas visually to see where they coalesce most.
• Document cross-connections to keep track of dharma’s path.
• Take action on emergent ideas, loosely held.

Takeaway

I spent a long time trying to discover who I am by looking backward. I then encountered the idea that I must create who I am by looking forward. I'm beginning to realize that becoming myself may require doing both at once: patiently layering what I inherit, discover, choose, and create until something appears that could only have been mine.