What are happiness and satisfaction?
I'm not going to provide lexicographical or theoretical definitions but practical ones, namely operational definitions: definitions a person can work with.
Happiness: what it feels like to be totally accepting of reality, not resisting, not lacking, OK right now.
Satisfaction: the feeling flowing from recognising the fulfilment of one's role in the world.
Joy: the rush that comes from a short-term increase in happiness or satisfaction.
What's the relationship between joy and happiness? If happiness and satisfaction are like speed, joy is like acceleration. It lasts only as long as the acceleration, but wears off as one settles into the new speed. Constant joy is impossible by this definition, just as there is a limit to how much a hedgehog or a Ferrari can accelerate.
So, what about the inverse of these?
Unhappiness: what it feels like to be non-accepting of reality, resisting, or lacking, not OK right now.
Dissatisfaction: the feeling flowing from recognising the non-fulfilment of one's role in the world. This could stem from fulfilling the wrong role, not knowing what the right role is, or knowing but not fulfilling it.
Distress: the rush that comes from a short-term decrease in happiness or satisfaction (namely an increase in unhappiness or dissatisfaction). If joy is acceleration, distress is deceleration.
What's the relationship between the two primitive pairs?
Unhappiness and happiness are two ranges on a spectrum from totally unhappy to totally happy. Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: likewise.
Note that the definition of distress is short-term. What about distress that extends indefinitely, namely misery? There is an odd asymmetry: joy appears difficult to maintain, whereas misery, in experience, can be relentless.
What's going on here?
I would define misery as joined up distress, in other words a sequence or bursts of distress. There may be small intervals between them, or they may overlap. This may give the appearance of constancy.
Looking at this from the physics point of view, just as acceleration is practically capped, deceleration is capped, so, based on the observation that joy tends to come in small, time-bound bursts, distress should, too. How can there be so much deceleration? Why does a person not simply come to a halt and drop down to the lower-level unhappiness and dissatisfaction, not exactly chipper, but not distressed either? Why, rather, does misery feel like a permanent state of emergency? Why is there this asymmetry?
It is well said that we can laugh at the same joke only a limited number of times, whereas we can cry at the same woe endlessly. People readily remain upset for years, decades, or their whole lives over some crime, misdemeanour, slight, plight, or gripe. What's going on here?
When things are going well, we don't need nudges or prompts, because no action is necessary: the system is happy with the status quo.
When things are going badly, we do. We need reminders. It is as thought the system is saying: I'm going to keep reminding him until he does something about it. When you come home, the dog is excited for about 90 seconds, then it goes back to licking something or sleeping. If the dog needs to be fed or needs to be let out, it will bark or whine until you respond.
Joy is the dog's reaction to you coming home. Distress is the dog's reaction to an unfulfilled physiological need. Misery is the persistence of that reaction to the unfulfilled physiological need.
Now, there will also be a form of misery where 'joined-up distress' is taking place because of an unending stream of unpleasant occurrences, but the odds of this are slim, except in extreme individual or societal scenarios. Mostly, misery comes in the form of this 'meta-cognition' of existing or past distresses. Nothing new is happening, but known sources of unhappiness etc. are being constantly re-experienced as though they are new.
In other words, misery does not mean more bad things are happening: it means the system wants me to do something about existing or known phenomena, and is going to make my life miserable until I do. We can call that state hell.
If this form of misery stems from re-recognising known phenomena (essentially: re-traumatising), is there is a parallel in the case of joy? In other words, a persistent joyful state is normally possible only if there is a rapid sequence of improvements in happiness or satisfaction over the short term, in other words, a series of accelerations.
Unsurprisingly, because we're talking physics here, there is a parallel. The key to this is gratitude. Just like with misery, joy can stem from a sequence of bursts representing changes in happiness and satisfaction, or can come from a re-recognition of known sources of happiness and satisfaction. Deliberately contemplating the existing sources of happiness and satisfaction is the practice of 'manual gratitude' in the form, say, of gratitude lists or sharing things you're grateful for. What does gratitude produce? The awareness of sources of happiness and satisfaction. This generates joy. Thus the deliberately fostered awareness of a source of happiness and satisfaction produces the same effect as their first onset or realisation. Join up mini-gratitudes in a sequence, punctuated by novel joys along the way, and what do you end up with?
The fourth dimension, or heaven, if you will.