The hidden cost of free time

For this week’s Reality Cheque, we’re looking at how free time is rarely free and how much Canadians spend on their spare time—no matter where that is.

Remember the coffee shop where the barista knew your order? What about the hair salon or barber shop you’d linger in just to gab. Even as a kid, there were the front steps where everyone ended up by 8 p.m. Sociologists call these “third places.” They’re not your home or workplace, but that physical somewhere in between, where you can show up without a set plan and leave knowing a few more people than when you arrived. They were cheap or free and, for the most part, unplanned.

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Increasingly, the price has gone up—a lot. Now we grab our $8 ventis and go. For many Canadians in their 20s and 30s, the place where they find community now comes with a membership fee, a dress code and a cancellation policy. Run clubs, pickleball leagues, CrossFit boxes, co-working spaces—they’re doing the job the neighbourhood corner used to. But belonging isn’t free anymore, and figuring out what it’s actually costing you is trickier than looking over your bill at the end of the night.

How belonging got a price tag

Troy Glover has spent decades studying how and where Canadians build community. He’s director of the Healthy Communities Research Network at the University of Waterloo, and is currently writing a book on leisure and social connection. His explanation for the shift starts with supply and demand.

“Many of the settings that once generated routine social contact have really weakened,” he says, pointing to fewer civic and voluntary organizations today. (Remember Canada World Youth or WE Charity? No!?) Plus, remote work has cut down on natural office chatter. Daily life has become “increasingly individualized, scheduled, privatized and digitally mediated.” The result: Canadians socialize less.

Paid third places are filling that gap, and Canadians are paying for it. A mid-range gym membership runs $50 to $65 a month nationally, though premium clubs charge well over $150. Community pickleball dues can be as low as $10 to $40 a year, but a spot at an indoor club with a sauna and locker room easily runs $50 to $56 a month. 

Run clubs are often the exception. Several of Toronto’s biggest crews, including Lululemon’s group, cost nothing to join. But the bill shows up later, in the $180 to $220 you’ll pay for a fresh pair of road shoes needed every 800 kilometres or so—as often as every couple of months if you’re deep in marathon training, according to Canadian Running Magazine. Or in the gap between running locally and running away. One Nova Scotia runner told CBC News he skipped the 2022 Boston Marathon after his round-trip flight alone jumped from around $500 to $1,800—choosing instead to spend a fraction of what the whole trip would cost (roughly $4,000) on a marathon closer to home.

Is the cost of belonging essential or optional?

Treating a gym membership like rent doesn’t quite work, and looking at it like a disposable subscription doesn’t either. Kristi Baerg MacDonald, a psychology researcher at Western University, argues that the real test isn’t the price tag; it’s whether the third place does its job.

“If it’s not serving the purpose of what you want,” she says, and you’re not actually gaining a feeling of belonging from it, then it’s probably not worth a line in your budget.

​But MacDonald adds an important caveat: belonging doesn’t show up on day one. “It’s important to give time for feelings of belongingness to develop,” she says.

The real math isn’t calculating the cost against benefit in a given month; it’s cost against benefit over however long it actually takes to know if a place is working for you. Often that’s about two months.

When it works, then you can reframe the spending. “Consider the cost as an investment in future health and wellbeing,” she says. Of course recognizing what you can and can’t afford. “Loneliness is associated with lower physical and mental health in the long run.” A $65-a-month membership looks different against that backdrop than it does next to, say, a streaming subscription.

Try joining a group—especially if it’s free!

Experts point to this warning sign: paying to keep up appearances rather than connection. MacDonald has watched the need to belong used against people. “There’s always the need to belong, or the feeling that spending money on something will get you status,” she says—and businesses know it.

The end result: gaining a bestie or two. “Before someone becomes a friend, they’re usually a familiar face,” Glover says, which is why showing up to a free run club every week can build more connections than one expensive class ever will.

Homophily is a sociology talk for our tendency to bond with people who share our interests. “We are almost always drawn to people who are similar to us in some sense,” Glover says. His advice: chase the activity you actually love, at whatever price point gets you in the door, and let the bonding and belonging follow.

The benefits of the free public courts at your local rec centre just might replace that of the pickleball club—without the monthly membership fees. Heck even nodding hello with the same stranger on your daily walk, one of Glover’s own examples, might do more for your feeling of belonging than the $400-a-month desk does.

Either way, the question worth asking isn’t just what a third place costs. It’s whether it’s worth it.

Read more from this issue of The Get:

1. Is finance hard or is it ADHD?
2. Prof Matthew Bidwell on how to keep and quit your job
3. How Albertans feel about the referendum and their personal finances
4. How hard is it to fix errors with Uber and other rideshares?