Most of the time people are talking about a kind of 'cognitive' happiness. Which is essentially divorced from the experience of positive valence emotions on a d

Most of the time people are talking about a kind of 'cognitive' happiness. Which is essentially divorced from the experience of positive valence emotions on a day to day basis. If you ask prisoners if they are happy, they will say no because it would be weird for them to say yes, wouldn't it? it would break our expectations and their own. It would break the model we all have of how we are supposed to feel about this or that. I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.