I’ve written frequently about happiness and joy. And yet, I haven’t taken the time to consider if these two emotions are the same. While joy and happiness are often used interchangeably, here are my thoughts on how to think about them.

Happiness is an emotional state—feeling happy about something means feeling satisfied—or maybe it’s an assessment of our life or someone else’s. Joy is an episodic emotion and is felt concurrent with the situation prompting this emotion and arises during activities. The following factors can explain the main differences between joy and happiness.

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Joy accompanies the process through and through. Whereas happiness seems to be more strictly tied to the moment of achievement of the process. Playing a sport may bring you joy during the activity, and you feel happy when you win.
Happiness involves an evaluation of a period of our life or another’s life. Happiness is not an experience of completeness and lack of further desires. Instead, it results from a balanced evaluation of what one has or has achieved.

Happiness is not exclusively dependent on the joyful experiences one has had throughout one’s life. Even a life that has been confronted with several sad episodes and obstacles could possibly be experienced as ‘happy’ in self-evaluation. It seems reasonable that when one realizes that one’s life is happy, it is possible also to experience deep joy.

Reference

Summa, M. (2020). Joy and happiness. In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion (pp. 416-426). Routledge.