I've been wondering, again, just why I find so much of the positive psychology movement as sweet and cloying as saccharin, this time as a result of reading Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches happiness at Harvard.

You can sense something of why just from the way the book is subtitled: in the US, 'Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment'; in the UK, 'Finding Pleasure, Meaning and Life's Ultimate Currency.' The first presents a gnostic front, implying you know you've been unhappy, and here's the way out. The second attends to Ben-Shahar's core thesis, that happiness is about finding the right balance between present and future pleasure, which is to say searching for meaning too (meaning taken as 'having purpose'). It's the 'ultimate currency' since happiness is so much more happy-making than money.

The problems with the approach are already deep.

• Happiness as pleasure sidelines all sorts of parts of life that are profounding satisfying but necessarily engage or at least risk pain, notably loving others, be they children, parents, or partners.
• Ben-Shahar counters this with the 'meaning dimension', though when meaning is defined as having purpose - as opposed to say living sacrificially, believing in God, or inhabiting a narrative - it is not at all clear whether it adds much to the basic pleasure dimension: the book implies that it doesn't much matter what purpose you have; within the bounds of civil behaviour any will do, so long as it enables you to take some present pleasure in the pleasure that will perhaps only be fully realised at some point in the future.
• Then there's the 'ultimate currency' analogy. Again, in spite of Ben-Shahar's protestations, this inevitably reduces the question of happiness to a cost-benefit analysis; it makes it a matter of quantity not quality. The goal is to increase the amount of happiness in your life, regardless of its quality. The only difference between this and out-and-out hedonism is that Ben-Shahar is wise enough to say happiness/pleasure-seeking mustn't undermine itself by being unsustainable.
• Ben-Shahar teaches at Harvard, so you'd think he would know a thing or two about what various thinkers have written on happiness. He does quote Aristotle a number of times, though fails to analyse how his conception of happiness, eudaimonia, differs from ours - which it does in several key respects (most notably in that it is only secondarily to do with pleasure, if at all). He doesn't mention Mill, possibly the most important modern philosopher on happiness, perhaps because Mill's best known comment on the matter is that if you think about happiness you lose it.
• Then there is the way that positive psychology seems to come apart at some of its key moments. For example, flow is much celebrated, but surely the point about flow is that during 'flow-full' activities you don't feel anything much, not even the passing of time. Its allure is that it transcends the happiness nexus.
• There is the narcissism of the book (one of the exercises is to recall a moment when you helped someone else in order to re-live how good that felt). This doesn't just practice self-indulgence, it undermines one of the key insights of the older traditions, namely that compassion, losing your sense of self by identifying with another, makes for happiness. This, I think, is the Dalai Lama's key message: selflessness - very different from the self-interested altrusim of positive psychology.

But fundamentally, I think that these books just don't work for me because it feels like they are playing in the valleys of contentment, and failing to see the peaks of human possibility all around them. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. And who would want to deny Ben-Sharar's students the extra happiness they gain from his course. Maybe they even lead better lives too. Except that the focus on happiness could be unhelpful; it has become too trivial a word because of its association with pleasure. Rather, human beings are spiritual creatures: it is not just that we seek significance, but that we know we are limited and seek to overcome. Like flow, surely a richer way of life is to transcend the happiness nexus altogether.

You don't need to be religious to believe this (in fact, being religious might not help: witness the 'positive thinking' religiosity of the US). It was the cornerstone of Nietzsche's philosophy, and in a different way Kant's and Schopenhauer's too. Perhaps Plato offers middle ground everyone can respect. For him, the key to life in all its fullness wasn't happiness at all. It was what he called the Good, that magnetic attraction of something ultimate, unified, delightful, passionate and moral. We only glimpse it, if we are lucky. But when we do it radically changes our perspective. We cease to be self-centred, knowing of something greater than ourselves. It is enlightening. Then, it seems to me, we might be on a path to wellbeing.