Is happiness even possible ?

[spellbound]

The bad thing about oneself is that none of the emotions you can feel are labelled. I know how to recognise some of them, for exemple it is a fact that I have cried before (although never sober) so that means I have felt sorrow. I can also easily recognise wrath, which I have felt a lot recently. Those are the two emotions which I feel the most in my life, and they are very strong ones. But happiness, from what I understand, is a more subtle emotion. I do not know if I have ever felt it. I assume I have, because the norm is that all children are happy, and I was a children once. But I do not have any proof or any reason to think that I have felt happiness, and I do not rule out the possibility that I have simply never felt it.
Of course, there is stuff I have enjoyed and times that I look back on fondly. Watching a great movie, playing video games with my best friend, my first parties, eating my comfort meal, finally beating a difficult boss in bloodborne. What I felt, could it be happiness ? I think of happiness as being something great (as in big), at least half as great as what sorrow feels like. I couldn't call those memories happy. It was too little. Or perhaps it really was happiness and my sadness overshadowed it, but I'm not convinced.
It would be awful if I had never experienced happiness.
It would be awful if I had and I was still so depressed.
If anyone has any thoughts that might help me solve this mystery or has a similar experience please let me know

 

[SergantWallbridge]

It was always my experience that happiness, unlike sorrow, relies on temporary suspension of one's understanding of the world, inherently, a sorrowful outlook is *compatible* with long-horizon, broad perspective whereas happiness doesn't seem to be. Happiness reguires conditioning oneself to see things in a very peculiar way; sure, it makes sense to look ~5 years into the future; living from day to day is depressing. But you can't look *too far* into the future: that would bring up inevitability of your death and the impermanence of things.

I am less confident as in reference to relative intensity of those two states (definitely varies across people, genetically determined).

 

[spellbound]

It was always my experience that happiness, unlike sorrow, relies on temporary suspension of one's understanding of the world, inherently, a sorrowful outlook is *compatible* with long-horizon, broad perspective whereas happiness doesn't seem to be. Happiness reguires conditioning oneself to see things in a very peculiar way; sure, it makes sense to look ~5 years into the future; living from day to day is depressing. But you can't look *too far* into the future: that would bring up inevitability of your death and the impermanence of things.

I am less confident as in reference to relative intensity of those two states (definitely varies across people, genetically determined).

One of the aspects of my life I've come to realise is that it has always, systematically gotten progressively worse. I always think I'm at rock bottom but it keeps going lower. For that reason I can't possibly feel happy about the near future, for I know it's going to be so so awful. Besides, I don't have much going on in life, so I've got nothing to look forward to.
It's not that I don't believe you, I think what you say is interesting, but I suppose I haven't ever been able to get into that specific conditioning you mentionned.