I don’t understand the concept of sales — going crazy over the reject stuff that nobody wanted to buy all year seems a bit unhinged — and I don’t understand the concept of the £5 dress, either. It may be cheap, but it’s also badly made from revolting fabric, on-trend for approximately three minutes (if you want to look like everybody else and don’t mind static) and you’ll throw it away in a fortnight. What’s the point — especially if scoring one involves a rugby scrum?

I’m in the minority, clearly, because a wild stampede heralded the opening of the cut-price giant Primark in London’s Oxford Street last week. The crowd was such that the store’s doors were damaged and two people were injured. The pavement was blocked; the police were called; queues at the tills grew to more than 100. The British fixation with “bargains” remains a mystery. If £5 is all you can afford, then fine. But otherwise these clothes are false economies: the kind that last you years and make you feel wonderful every time you put them on tend not to come with a £5 price tag. The rest, like so much else in our culture, is just disposable trash, most of it ugly, none of it good for you.

We’re so big on instant gratification that we don’t care. It doesn’t matter terribly if you’re talking only about clothes but, as the Prince of Wales pointed out last week, it becomes of some concern when you apply the principle to life in general.

“I suppose the concept of being able to pop a pill that claims to solve your problem without you actually having to do anything is enormously attractive — an easy way of avoiding boring exercise or whatever,” he said. “People somehow seem to think it’s easier to get a quick fix, regardless of whether a quick fix is merely suppressing the symptoms and not necessarily dealing with the root cause.”

Prince Charles was speaking with specific reference to health — he is a long-time advocate of what we quaintly used to call “alternative” medicine — and especially diet. He had, he said, come to the conclusion that many people were harmed by the foods they claimed to love the most and said, “You are what you eat.” He’s not wrong — just ask the 20-stone woman with the two-litre bottle of Diet Coke welded to her hand and the “addiction” to guzzling chocolate bars.

I can’t quite believe that I’m proposing to write an entire column praising the prince for his insight, but he is right in this instance and what he says needs saying. Children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) don’t necessarily need an automatic prescription for Ritalin, which is a class B drug. Fat people don’t necessarily need to be prescribed diet pills or have gastric bypasses and overweight ones don’t need liposuction where exercise would do.

Depressed women might be better served if Prozac wasn’t handed out like Smarties and someone bothered to find the causes of their depression instead. Cognitive behavioural therapy, the great white hope of the National Health Service, works fine in the short term because it gives people tools to deal with their stresses and phobias, but it doesn’t address the reason for those stresses’ and phobias’ existence.

Someone I know whose child is malnourished, existing (literally) on a diet of chips and fizzy drinks, obstinately refuses to make any connection between the child’s ghostly pallor, short attention span and lack of academic prowess and the fact that his diet is unspeakably unhealthy. Without wishing to sound overly melodramatic, I consider this to be a form of abuse, a parenting failure on a spectacular scale. That’s another thing: if you want cheap food, eat pulses and rice, not battery chicken and genetically modified additive-laden 99p “specials”.

Then there’s rehab. I have become obsessed by this in recent weeks, what with a slew of celebs — Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Robbie Williams for starters — trotting loudly into rehab and then trotting straight out again. When I was in my late teens, I knew a disproportionate number of heroin addicts. A couple died and the rest, sooner or later, went to treatment centres, most frequently to Broadway Lodge in Somerset. It was a hard slog. They disappeared for months. Halfway houses were involved and then there was the daily visit to Narcotics Anonymous. It took years for some of these people to get better and during those years they were fragile, anxious, vulnerable, “ill”, for want of a better word.

Fast forward 20 years and “rehab” lasts a month if you’re lucky and is more often than not seen as a good career move. In Britain the Priory (which has failed to help a single person I know who has been there) is shorthand for a certain kind of louche glamour; if you’re a stupid person, the words “the Priory” don’t inspire pity or compassion but a degree of admiration: it all sounds glamorously rock’n’roll.

In America, details of treatment are made public for anyone who cares to know, rehab involves semi-tropical locations and pedicures, and when you come out “cured” after a fortnight, it’s straight back to the nightclub scene that caused you such difficulty in the first place. And, needless to say, straight back to rehab six months later. (I have a theory that some people are addicted to rehab, in the way that some people are narcissistic enough to become addicted to therapy when there isn’t anything wrong with them.)

What does this have to do with the £5 Primark dress? Everything. Fashion-lite, medicine-lite, diet-lite, food-lite, rehab-lite: we live in a world where everything demanding has been simplified on the basis that we’re so moronic and greedy for results that we can deal only with the bite-sized.

As it happens, last Thursday — when Primark opened — was the first really beautiful day of spring, one of those days when you are in an inexplicably good mood from the moment you wake because the sun is shining and all seems well with the world.

What did thousands of people do in their lunch hour, when they could have been nibbling sandwiches in beautiful Hyde Park, a 10-minute walk from Primark? Practically suffocate themselves in hot, grubby Oxford Street for the sake of clothing whose sole merit is extreme cheapness.

I sometimes have the horrible feeling that nobody knows how to live any more — that we’re just a horde of rampaging greedygutses, hungry for everything and anything we can consume. The problem is, none of it is nourishing — in any sense.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden