Happiness is due to sudden improvement AKA going from 0 to 1 in a relatively short time.

If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving.

WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12

That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences.

And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level