I would argue that joy and happiness are not the same thing. I have difficulty articulating it, but I think Ursula Le Guin expresses it well (because of course

I would argue that joy and happiness are not the same thing. I have difficulty articulating it, but I think Ursula Le Guin expresses it well (because of course she does) in The Left Hand of Darkness: "I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy."