Are we done yet? I still have several deadlines to meet before the end of the day... Photograph: Alamy

As a fairly regular meditator, I naturally responded with only a slight smile and a deep sense of imperturbable inner peace to the latest crop of articles asserting that mindfulness has conquered the highest levels of American corporate life.

This most recent coverage has been triggered by Mindful Work, a new book by the New York Times reporter David Gelles, which documents and largely celebrates the discovery of meditation by hedge fund managers, health insurers, Ford, Target, Goldman Sachs and the Bank of America as a way to reduce stress and boost employee productivity. Arianna Huffington is thrilled by the news; the Wall Street Journal is excited; even the Marine Corps is interested. Now, obviously, I wouldnt want to suggest that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America or the US military dont always have humanitys best interests at heart in everything they do. But we should probably pause mindfully, of course to ask if the corporate mindfulness revolution is something to be entirely happy about.

Not, I hasten to add, because meditation doesnt reduce stress or boost productivity: those benefits, along with numerous others, are among those to which a growing mountain of scientific evidence does point. (Its not noted often enough how many of these studies are explicitly preliminary, using small samples and reaching tentative results but there are certainly a lot of them by now.) And also not because meditation, as Buddhists sometimes argue, needs to be kept pure. (Its been used for questionable ends at least since medieval times, when Japanese samurai meditated to become more fearless killers.) Instead, the problem is one familiar from corporate attempts to impose organized fun at the office: just because some activity is good in itself, it doesnt follow that good things will happen when its co-opted by the engines of commerce.

As Joe Keohane points out in this savvy New Republic essay, mindfulness classes at the office are part of a broader focus on restoring meaning to work not least because, as a 2013 Gallup survey found, companies whose employees are comparatively more engaged generate 147% higher earnings per share. Theres something obviously a bit troubling about treating personal meaning (which is, by definition, the ultimate reason for doing anything) as just another means to an organizations ends. Workers who are emotionally invested in their work also tend to be less motivated by earthlier enticements, such as pay, vacations, flextime and good hours, Keohane noted. Its easy to see how meditation could serve a similarly ideological purpose as an enabler of workaholic culture, rather than a counterweight to it making a bad situation just a little more bearable, and therefore, in the long run, perpetuating it.

Either that, or meditation at work could become one more thing in which employees feel obliged to participate, so as to curry favor with bosses. In which case, as with managerially imposed fun activities, itll simply make a bad situation worse. In this excerpt from Gelless book, we learn how Mark Bertolini, chief executive of the health insurer Aetna, was driven to meditation following a skiing accident in Vermont. Thats the kind of desperate crisis that can invest a spiritual quest with intense personal significance. But Aetnas employees didnt encounter meditation in the same way: they were offered classes because Bertolini decided to use his company as a laboratory to see if it might help them. To be clear, he seems like a great boss: at the same time as introducing meditation classes, he gave his lowest-paid employees a 33% pay rise, after reading Thomas Piketty. Yet even the best boss might struggle to avoid communicating a subtle pressure to take part and meditation undertaken out of a reluctant sense of obligation seems unlikely to be much help.

In any case, its worth asking whats really meant by that word help. Because like all the best happiness techniques psychotherapy, religious spiritual practices and secular ones, such as Stoicism meditation isnt necessarily best thought of as a technique at all, if by that one means an efficient way of reaching some predetermined end. Much more momentously, it might cause you to reconsider the ends themselves. Heres the meditation teacher Kenneth Folk on the notion of meditation as productivity booster:

For some people, the enhanced focus and creativity that often comes from training the mind through meditation might translate into Getting Shit Done. For others, greater intimacy with their bodies and the inner workings of their minds might result in Getting Less Shit Done as they reconsider what is most important in their lives Using meditation as a productivity tool is like using your car for a greenhouse. Its not that your car wouldnt be a good greenhouse; it very well might [But] your car is good for a lot of things, including driving to the market on the odd chance that your own garden fails.

Besides, if youll permit me to conclude by jumping off the spiritual deep end: isnt there something a little perverse in demanding that a practice dedicated to paying attention in the present moment (the only kind that ever exists) should justify itself through being useful for some future moment (which never arrives)? As with the other wellness interventions were ceaselessly urged to adopt getting enough sleep, spending plenty of time in nature its understandable that one might be drawn to meditation in order to make other aspects of life run more smoothly. But we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that, in an ideal world, paying attention to the present, sleeping well and hiking in the mountains wouldnt need to be justified on productivity-related grounds. So what is the point of them? They are or ought to be their own point.

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Meditation sweeps corporate America, but it's for their health. Not yours