In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's nameless narrator, travelling with his son, pulls up at Crater Lake in Oregon, a natural wonder of vivid blue water surrounded by sheer cliffs. The US National Park Service calls it "a place of immeasurable beauty", but the narrator is underwhelmed: "[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, 'Well, there it is', just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks, too ... You point to something as having quality, and the quality tends to go away."

I thought of that recently while in the Arctic, researching an article for this magazine. The trip was endlessly awe-inspiring, with one exception: the northern lights. They'd been so hyped that by the time I was woken in the early hours and told to come outside and marvel, the moment was already spoiled. I was too busy monitoring my own amazement levels and finding them wanting. The northern lights: well, there they were.

The annoying thing about positive emotions - happiness, wonder, love - is that when you pressure yourself into trying to feel them, you can't. When the pressure comes from others, it's worse, which is surely part of the reason for the revulsion many employees feel in the face of desperate corporate efforts to "make work fun". One of the most popular business books on both sides of the Atlantic right now is Fish! A Remarkable Way To Boost Morale And Improve Results, purportedly based on the high spirits of salespeople at Seattle's fish market, who fling fish through the air to each other as they work. Several major US firms have "adopted the Fish! philosophy": employees are rewarded with "fish cards" when they show the right attitude, and the very best workers get a soft toy fish called Pete the Perch thrown at them by colleagues. ("Play!" is one of four Fish! principles, because "everyone can benefit from a little lightening up during the day".) Every time I think about Pete the Perch, something inside me dies. Has none of these fun-fixated managers ever watched The Office?

These attempts to induce good feelings through top-down effort are self-defeating - whether imposed on workers by management or imposed on yourself by your rational brain. There's something in the definition of happiness that requires that it arise freely; you can provide the right environment for it, but can't force the matter. Otherwise you (or those you manage) get caught in the psychological trap known as the double bind - the unspoken demand whereby, in the words of the philosopher Alan Watts, "you are required to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily".

Enforced happiness is no happiness at all, even if the person doing the enforcing is you. Anyone who's ever gone on holiday with a grim-faced determination to Have A Relaxing Time knows this all too well: deciding to make yourself relax isn't going to help you relax - just like adding an exclamation mark to the title of your business book isn't going to help make it fun.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com