Thomas Sutcliffe: Want to be happy? Expect a bit less of life

According to an all-party committee of MPs, Britain's general practitioners are fuelling addiction and dependency by getting slap-happy with the prescription pad, doling out painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs as a short cut to a quiet life – both for patient and doctor. "GPs have got Britain hooked on painkillers" was the headline on one newspaper report – conjuring an image of Britannia in a house-coat and fluffy slippers, reaching out a quivering hand for the 46th Nurofen Plus of the day.

This seemed a little one-sided to me – or at least to exempt one significant component of the problem from the weight of parliamentary scrutiny and disapproval. After all – whatever incentives they're being offered by big pharma to employ their products – I haven't noticed that doctors have been making house-calls recently to press sample blister-packs into our hands and encourage us to call in for more whenever we feel like it.

They are prescribing because people are turning up in their surgeries complaining – about pain or low spirits or sleeplessness. "Oooh doctor, me welts-chmertz is giving me terrible gyp", says the old lady from Salford and, for want of an hour and half to chat her into a sunnier mood, the doctor signs a script for Prozac. Whatever the mechanism, the problem begins with a patient arriving in the surgery expecting that the doctor has a solution for what ails them.

The number of those patients seeking help for anxiety or stress or general melancholy has, it is widely agreed, risen alarmingly in recent decades. Some, such as Oliver James in his book Affluenza, argue that this is a symptom of the essentially diseased nature of certain kinds of developed society – in which the pursuit of wealth, fame and status is, literally, sickening.

Others lay the blame at the door of successive governments, which have serially failed to put right inequalities of opportunity and lifestyle. Still others suggest that if we could all just live like the Yanomami – foraging from our surroundings and never straying further than 40 miles from our homes – we could psychologically right ourselves. But I'm not sure that happiness itself has taken enough blame for our unhappiness. By which I mean the relatively modern notion that we are owed happiness as a right and are entitled to be aggrieved if it isn't forthcoming.

Look at Amazon and you'll get some sense of what I mean – a whole shelf-full of books which offer guidance to attaining happiness – my favourite of which is Fast Track To Happiness: From Fed Up To Fabulous In Ten Days, which cannily markets itself to the impatient depressive.

And, for obvious reasons, none of these books question the notion that happiness is a goal that can be achieved with the right kind of application, that it is there for the taking. Which is rather depressing if you think about it, since it reconfigures all those passages of non-happiness (crucially different to unhappiness) as failures, either of the state or yourself.

In truth though, what's consistent about societies that don't drive themselves mad worrying about happiness is not its effortless possession, but the absence of any expectation that it should be a routine state of affairs. In fact the very best prescription for a happier society (provided such a thing could be achieved without extinguishing the desire for a fairer society) would be lower expectations all round – and certainly less presumption that a GP could cure what Freud once wisely described as "ordinary unhappiness".

You either win, or are 'snubbed'

"Our top actresses were snubbed for the major gongs" reported the Mirror of Sunday's Baftas. "Keira Snubbed At the Baftas" read the headline in the Mail, while the Sun, under the indignant headline "What a Cheek", wrote that "Brit stars Keira Knightley and Julie Christie were sensationally snubbed at the Baftas". It wasn't that Marion Cotillard had deservedly won, you understand, it was that "our" actresses had been knowingly insulted. There actually was someone who was snubbed at the Baftas – Paul Thomas Anderson, whose film There Will Be Blood (left, starring Daniel Day-Lewis), is vastly superior to Atonement. But the Sun wasn't worried about that.

* I was sorry to see that Polaroid is to end production of instant film in 2009, having already suspended the manufacture of instant cameras.

It had to happen, of course, since Polaroid's technology makes little sense in the age of digital cameras and home printers. But if nobody takes up Polaroid's offer to licence its system, I fear that a little bit of magic will have disappeared from the world.

The odd thing is that if Polaroid cameras really had been instant – as digital cameras pretty much are now – they would not have been nearly as seductive. I know some photographers cherish the aesthetic quality of the finished photos and some artists, including Ralph Steadman, like to manipulate the image as if develops, but for most of us the enchantment lay in watching a little slice of reality resolve itself out of a featureless grey rectangle. That you had to wait, just a little, was crucial to the pleasure.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk

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