I can’t tell you how glad I am that I’m not going on holiday this summer. It means there’s less chance I’ll have to take the Heathrow Express. For years now, the Heathrow Express – a stupidly expensive 15-minute train link between Paddington and the airport – has inspired in me an acute and vengeful rage.

The train itself is OK, but somebody has decided to fit out almost all of its carriages with multiple television screens. The implication is that the screens are there due to passenger demand, but this can’t be true or else they’d have off buttons. So. For 15 minutes you sit there through news updates that are so out of date that, by the time you get to the airport, you’re convinced that Argentina is about to invade the Falklands; or footage of flamingos set to an ambient soundtrack which cannot be relaxing because the volume’s on max. In case there’s any chance you might do what you’re supposed to do on a train journey, and drift off into some private thoughts of your own, the news and nature footage are interspersed by pointless safety bulletins and a stream of semi-factoids for the under-tens: “London is the capital of England.” Or, “Spiders have eight legs.” Usually, I spend the journey lurching from carriage to carriage with all my luggage, sweating, swearing, searching for the Quiet Zone, then almost choke with rage when I realise that they’ve gone and moved it to First Class. Sometimes I cry.

But what really astounds and infuriates me is what happens next. First, I start fantasising about all the angry letters I am going to write to BAA when I get home. I imagine these letters of complaint in every detail: the exact wording, my irrefutable line of argument, even the stationery. Shall I use Times headed notepaper or wait to reveal the fact that I work for a national newspaper later, on speakerphone during an on-air sting arranged by The Times in collaboration with Radio 4? Millions of fellow travellers will rise up and demand that all information screens be dismantled from trains and buses across the land. A guerrilla movement will be formed whose members never leave home without a pair of wire clippers. Trains, cafés, supermarkets will be revolutionised. Peace will reign. This time it’s going to happen.

As I said, I imagine all this, very vividly. I imagine it again on the return journey. Then I get home, open my post and forget all about it. Why? Now I know. Because I am lazy, stupid, weak, loss-averse, stubborn, easily led, conformist and am prone to inertia. We all are. It’s the latest thing. To do anything at all except breathe, sleep or eat pizza, we need a “nudge”.

“Nudging” has been a buzz word in marketing for a while, now both David Cameron and Barack Obama want to harness its power in politics. Their bible is Nudge, by US academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who want to alter “people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”. Officially, nudging is called “choice architecture”. By changing people’s “default options”, businesses and politicians can encourage the public to make different decisions. Thaler and Sunstein cite an experiment in which an image of a fly was etched on to airport urinals, just to the left of the drain. It turns out that if you give men a target, they aim more accurately: “spillage” declined by 80 per cent.

I can see the point of nudging people into better health, better investments and cleaner environments. Opt-out organ donation schemes, for example. It’s being nudged by businesses that gives me the creeps and makes me wonder what I’ve ever done in my life without being nudged. Without free subscriptions, two-for-one offers and standing orders, my life would be a clutter-free paradise of comparative wealth. I wouldn’t be paying for a LOVEFiLM subscription I never use and membership of a swimming pool in a country in which I haven’t lived for 14 years. I wouldn’t be slowly coming around to the idea that it is reasonable to pay stupid amounts for a first-class ticket on the Heathrow Express because they’ve cut down my options and moved the Quiet Zone into First Class.

I am lazy, stupid, easily led and prone to inertia. At least now I know. This afternoon, I will call the swimming pool in Germany, then tell my mobile phone company that they’re too expensive and I’m off. This morning I wrote the letter to BAA. It’s sitting there in an envelope on the table opposite my front door. If I really focus, there’s an extremely good chance it might actually get sent.

Kate Muir is away

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