I am trying to put it as Somerset Maugham does in "Of Human Bondage".

Life is like a piece of rug and life of each of ours can be treated as a pattern on this. As the weaver elaborates his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There is as little need to do this as there is use. It is merely something he does for his own pleasure. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he has the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that do not matter: it seem, and so to him it is. In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there is no meaning and that nothing is important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that work out the pattern. There is one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there are others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace.

Life may seem horrible when measured by its happiness, but it might be measured by something else.

Happiness matters as little as pain. They come in, both of them, as all the other details of life come in, to the elaboration of the design.