I’ve been spending hours building the Future Self-Portrait program.
The other day, after several hours of working on building the pitch, my brain was fried. I needed a break.
But as I opened my email, a headline immediately caught my attention.
It was all about why we should stop searching for happiness.
My first reaction was resistance.
Because 13 years ago, I was desperately seeking to feel happy.
I was in a toxic relationship. I wanted out, but I kept falling back into the same toxicity.
Until one day, he left, and I fell apart.
I didn’t know if I was depressed or simply miserable.
All I knew was that I felt empty.
I remember praying for one thing: To be happy.
So when I read that Viktor Frankl, Carl Jung, and Alan Watts all warned against searching for happiness, I couldn’t stop wondering...
Why not? My life changed because of it. Or so I thought.
What they understood
Watts wrote that chasing happiness is like pursuing a phantom: “the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead.”
Jung, when asked about happiness in an interview, said, “The more you deliberately seek happiness, the more sure you are not to find it. It is therefore far better to take things as they come along, with patience and equanimity.”
Frankl argued that happiness cannot be pursued. It can only ensue, meaning it follows on its own, as the natural result of a meaningful life.
He believed that the search for meaning, not pleasure or power, is the primary motivation in human life.
Jung agreed, but Watts went one step further. He argued that even meaning is not something to chase. Life is not a problem to solve or a goal to reach. It fulfills itself in being lived, the way music fulfills itself in being played, not in reaching the final note.
What I got out of this is that happiness shows up while you are busy with something deeper. Frankl called it meaning. Jung called it wholeness. Watts called it presence.
Then I looked back at my own life
I reflected on what happened when I was chasing happiness.
I remember clearly making the decision to say yes to new experiences.
A yes took me to Landmark, where my self-discovery journey began.
Another yes took me to the Kabbalah Centre, a place I had walked past so many times without ever going in.
At the time, I was searching for something new, a new experience, a new anything. But not meaning. I was oblivious to what meaning meant.
Looking back, I wasn’t really chasing happiness.
I was opening myself to the possibility of a new world.
This new world led me inward. It taught me to listen to myself.
Listening to that voice within is what led me to art.
And art led me back to me.
To have awareness of myself. A relationship with myself. Most importantly, my passion, my purpose.
The word underneath happiness
Life will never be free from pain. There will always be uncertainty.
Disappointment. Loss.
What I understood is that there is something deeper than happiness.
A steady inner calm that remains, even when life becomes difficult. I finally learned the word for it: Equanimity.
Now Frankl’s words make complete sense.
If it feels like you’re chasing happiness, maybe the next step isn’t trying harder.
Maybe it’s simply saying yes to something you’ve never tried before.
You don’t need to know where it leads. I didn’t.
Maybe that’s why the article caught my attention.
The Future Self-Portrait isn’t really about chasing joy or happiness.
It’s about becoming the woman who naturally experiences those things.
You don’t chase the feeling.
You become the woman.
Then the feeling follows.
I’m Claudia, a portrait artist who uses creativity to help women bring the vision of their future to life.