Leisure, spending and free time

The cheapest ones are also the most common. People sit on tiny plastic stools drinking iced tea for a few thousand dong and talk for hours, or walk around a lake in the evening when the air cools down. At weekends, pedestrian streets fill with families, and young people ride out to a riverbank to fly kites or have a picnic. None of it needs a ticket. So why do some people feel that fun requires money? I'd put a lot of it down to comparison. When your feed is full of friends at rooftop bars and beach resorts, a free afternoon in the park starts to look like a failure, even if you'd enjoy it more. Advertising reinforces this by presenting leisure as something you purchase. There's a grain of truth in the belief, to be fair: certain experiences, like a concert or a trip abroad, really are memorable and really do cost money. The mistake is assuming the price tag is what makes them enjoyable, when it's usually the company. Looking ahead, I think leisure will split in two directions. Organised entertainment will keep getting pricier, since venues, performers and travel all cost more each year, and businesses are very good at inventing premium versions of things. Meanwhile, cities are slowly adding parks, walking streets and free festivals, partly because residents demand them. So the expensive options will multiply, but I'm hopeful that the free ones won't vanish.