This is a highly personal thread. I wish for it to get like posts: people talking about their personal experiences, and not about generalized opinions.

You don't need to write in as exacting details as I have, but it would help if you stuck to the given scale of comparison / absolute value I used here, when you want to describe your mood in a more evaluative way.

Happiness is a mood. A state of existence.

It is not a simple on-off state; it is a spectrum.

I wonder how other people rate their happiness.

I: There is a baseline feeling, that is not happy, not sad, not depressed, not painful, not pleasurable.

+ 10 is the happiest state a person can attain. Theoretically.
- 10 is the worst possible state. Full of pain, anguish, fear.
0 is the baseline feeling or mood.

There were times in my life when I hit -7 and they lasted, in the last 30-35 years, about a day or so.

In my twenties, -5 was the baseline, and hit -7 for weeks at a time. Twice I dipped below -8 for a week.

In my pre-teens I was floating at around +2 or +3, and hit +7 a few times for a moment or two. In my teens I floated at around -2, -3, occasionally hitting +7. I especially hit +7 during times when I was bringing up nostalgia from my earlier life with the help from friends. One session lasted about 5 minutes. This ability to rely on nostalgia evaporated when I emigrated from my homeland at age 18.

In my recent years, my baseline is anywhere between -1 and +1, occasionally rising to +3 for an hour or two in a day. Once or twice I hit +7, on the average once every five years, each episode lasting a moment, except in very recent times (within six months ago) I hit +7 about three times, each lasting only for a moment.

The longest strong feeling in the positive end was a +7 that went on for three to four hours, non-stop. I had come home from a coffee house, and I put on a tape, Santana's live albums stringed end-to-end. I was grinning the whole time. No, I was not on drugs. I have no clue what had precipitated that. Might have been the coffee. A big cuppa of Second Cup coffee.

In summary, I can say that put my big O's end-to-end lasted longer than putting my +7s end-to-end.