Between soaring rents, stagnant wages, and runaway fees, casual socializing has become an expensive luxury. Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt examine how vanishing third spaces and shrinking homes are pushing a generation into the "alone economy" - swapping weekly get-togethers for screen time and fueling a structural crisis in community well-being.
In this episode of Classonomics, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt break down whether "funflation" is an actual economic crisis or simply a complaint of the modern era. They examine how runaway land costs and condo redevelopment are wiping out accessible third spaces like grassroots music venues and bowling leagues, and why shoebox condos and vanishing backyards effectively killed the casual dinner party. And how the rapid rise of the "alone economy" is fuelling isolation with real social and economic consequences.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Sabrina Maddeaux: There’s a name for the rising price of a night out: funflation. Concerts, games, a movie, a drink with friends—it all costs more than it used to. It's easy to file that under first-world problems, but we think it’s a much bigger cost-of-living story than it looks.
Mike Moffatt: When fun gets expensive, people have less of it, and the knock-on effects pile up fast. People see their friends less. They skip the date nights out that keep local businesses alive, and they lose the casual connections that lead to jobs, relationships, and a sense of community.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Younger Canadians who are already handing most of their paychecks to their landlords feel it first. Today we’re digging into funflation, the rise of what some call the alone economy, and what it means for our social lives and the wider economy. Mike, I’d like to set the stage with some Canadian data on what people are doing with their time, how that’s changed over the years, and who they’re spending it with, which is increasingly themselves.
Stats Canada’s Time Use Survey says that in 1986, almost half of Canadians saw a friend on an average day. By 2022, that was down to only about 1 in 5. The biggest drop was among working-age Canadians, 25 to 64, which went from 42% down to 14%. They found that even when people do see friends, the time together shrank from five hours to under four.
This isn’t something people are choosing to do, really. More than 46% say they don’t spend enough time with their friends and family, up from about a third in the early 1990s. Canadians are feeling more pressed for time than at any point since StatCan started asking. I see this in my personal life as well; certainly over the last decade or 15 years, friends are spending less time together.
When you do see each other, it’s for shorter periods of time. That’s not by choice; it’s influenced by different factors: the cost of a night out and funflation, as we discussed at the start of the episode, but also people moving further away because of housing costs, making it harder to see each other.
It’s harder to coordinate because of bad traffic, construction, and how difficult it is to get around the city. All these things are adding up to people spending less time together and more time alone.
Mike Moffatt: I certainly see it too with people I know in their 20s and early 30s. I look at all the things I used to do in the late ‘90s and early 2000s and all the places I used to go. So many of them are closed now, like Call the Office in London, Ontario, which was one of the best places to see live music.
I think of all of these places I used to go to that are closed, and I haven’t really seen them replaced by much. Even as somebody pushing 50 who doesn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with 20-year-olds, I’ve noticed you don’t see groups of young people hanging out with each other nearly as much as you did in my day.
Sabrina Maddeaux: The places that do exist are increasingly expensive. My husband and I like to say that just leaving the house costs $200 these days. You go to a restaurant, buy two drinks and an appetizer, and all of a sudden you’re at $75, which certainly didn’t use to be the case.
But, Mike, how much of this really comes down to money? Is funflation real, or just a casual way of saying, “I’m broke, and ticket fees are evil”?
Mike Moffatt: It’s absolutely real. This is not just young people complaining - and I know we hear that from boomers and some Gen-Xers - it’s absolutely real.
In my view, it’s due to a combination of three things. The first is lacklustre wage growth for young people over the last 20 or 30 years, so incomes haven’t really gone up all that much.
Second, rents have gone up faster than inflation and faster than income, so your generation doesn’t have the same disposable income my generation did, leaving less left over for fun. Third is the cost of doing those activities: things like tickets and all the fees around them have grown much faster than inflation.
There’s going to be an episode where I tell a lot of stories about being a 20-something Gen-Xer, but back in the early 2000s, the Toronto Blue Jays had a promotion where you could get a ticket to every single home game for a dollar each - 81 games for $81.
We wouldn’t even go to a lot of the games; we just liked having them so we could go on a whim. You’d decide at 4 p.m., “What should we do today? The Jays are playing Texas. Let’s go do that”. Nobody would do that anymore.
That kind of cheap entertainment has really gone away.
Sabrina Maddeaux: That compounds: there’s the ticket price alone, but then you look at the cost of food and drink in a stadium, which has also gone up hugely. You find yourself going to a Jays game - something that used to be incredibly accessible - and now you’re likely spending easily a couple hundred dollars for what should be something you can do easily with friends.
Mike Moffatt: I really don’t want to pick on the Jays here, because Major League Baseball is still one of the most affordable tickets around in pro sports or otherwise. It’s really the big-ticket events where prices have run away. Pollstar tracks the world’s top concert tours, and they reported that the average ticket price for big-name concerts is up about 40% since 2019.
We can certainly say incomes aren’t up 40% since 2019 - that’s double the rate of inflation in Canada. Stadium shows, playoff games, the World Cup- we did an episode on that a few months ago - they’re all luxury goods territory now. The people who can afford them tend to be people like me rather than younger people.
It’s even true for less marquee events like movies. The Competition Bureau went after companies like Cineplex because they’re tacking extra charges onto the advertised price. It’s not just the price of the ticket, but all the junk fees around it.
Again, I’m going to go full Gen-Xer here: back in ‘97, my sister and I went to a Radiohead concert in London, Ontario. Yes, they actually came to London. The tickets were $20, which was real money, but it seemed fairly reasonable at the time. When I bought the tickets for the two of us, there was a service charge of about $1.50. I was outraged by this, thinking, “Oh my God, this is such a rip-off”. Nowadays, those charges are a lot more than that. I didn’t realize how good we had it.
Relative to my generation, on average, young people are spending more in real terms than we did. But you’re getting a lot less because you’re not getting those Radiohead tickets for $20. In the last ten years, that spending is flat. These concerts and sporting events keep going up in price, and while you’re spending the same overall amount in your budget, you’re getting less for it. Your generation really is getting cheated out of the experiences that my generation had.
Sabrina Maddeaux: The data shows that even in the last ten years, average real spending on recreation hasn’t changed that much, but my guess is that average hides a lot. Who’s actually feeling the squeeze here?
Mike Moffatt: Averages are absolutely misleading. I always tell the story about the statistician with one foot in a bucket of ice and one foot in a bucket of boiling water. On average, he was comfortable. It’s the same idea here.
If you’re someone like me who bought a home decades ago when prices were lower, you can absorb these higher entertainment costs because you’re not getting bled dry by rent and mortgage costs. But if you’re in your 20s or 30s and live in a city like Toronto, or even Ottawa, which is relatively less expensive, your rent takes the biggest bite out of your paycheck. Going to concerts is going to be one of the first things that gets cut when you’re trying to pay the bills. Doubly so if you’re single.
Spending data shows that people living on their own put a bigger share of their budget toward shelter, which makes sense because they’re not splitting the cost with anyone, so they don’t have money for anything else.
Yet I’m constantly reading headlines about Taylor Swift selling out arenas all over the world, which gives the impression that young people can not only afford these high prices, but are often willing to travel to see their favourite shows. That’s an extravagance not many people in my generation would have considered unless they were making bags of money. Make that make sense for us.
Sabrina Maddeaux: A few things are at play. First, because the cost of living has become so high and traditional milestones - like owning a home, starting a family, getting married, or taking a vacation - feel out of reach for younger people, they’re saying, “What the heck, I’m just going to throw money at having fun and having an experience. I can’t afford assets, but at the same time, I’m human and want to spend money in a way that feels good and creates memories”.
They’re spending sometimes more than they should on experiences because they don’t see the point in saving for a home they believe they’ll never be able to afford no matter how much they save. They’re often quite right about that.
But the other thing is that fun is turning into a once-a-year splurge instead of a weekly habit. People might save up for that one big concert or trip, but then they’re quietly skipping a dozen small nights out to pay for it - skipping the weekly pizza night with friends, going on dates, or going to the bowling alley. While there’s that one moment on Instagram making a big splash, they’re sitting at home the rest of the month or year, leaving a big gap in their social lives.
These big events are marketed as once-in-a-lifetime moments, and everyone is posting them. Missing out often feels worse than overspending, so it goes on the credit card. We also see new ways to pay beyond credit cards: platforms like Afterpay, where you can put concert tickets, travel, or other experiences on installment plans. But at the end of the day, rent eats so much of the paycheck that “fun money” is the first thing to go. The fun that gets cut is usually the stuff that keeps you connected to friends and family.
I want to pivot to a Bloomberg piece I read recently by Allison Schrager with a great title: “Why Bowl Together When You Can Scroll Alone?” Bowling used to be that classic, cheap, social, middle-class night out.
I remember going to bowling birthday parties growing up and going as a teenager. Even though I don’t know the last time I went, if you go now, they seem to be luxury places that are more like cocktail bars than the bowling alleys of the past. What’s happening here, Mike?
Mike Moffatt: First of all, I love the title of that article. One thing people might not know about me is I absolutely love bowling. It’s a perfect case study here, and I have the credentials to back it up. Fun fact about me: in the 1982–1983 bowling season, I was named Most Valuable Player, Most Improved Player, and Rookie of the Year at Fairmont Lanes in London, Ontario. My parents still have the trophy somewhere in their basement. I should find it and bring it out on an episode.
But bowling has gone into substantial decline since I was terrorizing the lanes of East London. It was very popular in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s; nowadays, not so much. Lucky Strike, the biggest bowling company in the US, has lost almost half of its market value in the past year.
For league membership, there were about 10 million people in the 1970s, and now it’s down to about a million - a 90% drop. The Bloomberg article is absolutely correct that we’re seeing this massive decline in activities like bowling.
Sabrina Maddeaux: What happened there?
Mike Moffatt: It’s mostly the same thing that happened to housing: land costs. These are businesses that take up a lot of land and carry a lot of debt. You have to build the lanes, maintain them, and so on, so the business model just doesn’t work as well anymore.
That’s the piece I think gets missed: looking at all the cheap places people used to hang out, whether bowling alleys, rec centers, community halls, or the bar with the pool table, all of that requires a lot of square footage. In many cases, these places have actually been turned into housing.
There was a mini-golf place in the West End of London that I spent way too much time at in high school and took a few dates to. That mini-golf place was sold off to build apartments. I’m not sure if they’re completed yet, but it shows that the housing crisis has bled into these activities.
Overall, any business model that has low prices but requires cheap land to make the math work, from bowling to laser tag, is getting crushed. The businesses that do survive can charge a lot per square foot. You’re losing that $15 night out, but the places you mentioned with expensive appetizers and a couple of drinks, where you spend about $250 a night per person, can stay open.
We’ve really lost the lower-end, more affordable activities.
Sabrina Maddeaux: I want to stay on that because I think it’s the heart of this: How much has runaway real estate pricing driven up the cost of fun and wiped out third spaces where people used to gather?
Mike Moffatt: A lot of it. I would actually say most of it. Take the city of Toronto, for example. Only about 5% of grassroots music venues own their own buildings, according to the city itself. Everyone else is a tenant. Because they’re tenants, they’re exposed to every rent hike, redevelopment offer, and so on.
A lot of those places have turned into housing. The city lost about 30 of these venues in the years before the pandemic. The Phoenix Concert Theatre announced that it was closing to make way for condos, so Toronto now gives live music venues a 50% property tax cut just to keep the lights on.
It looks like it’s helping somewhat, but that can only go so far.
You have this supply-side problem, but you also have a demand-side problem: for younger people, every dollar that goes to rent or a mortgage is a dollar you’re not spending at the bowling alley or going to see live music.
Businesses are getting squeezed at both ends. They have both a supply problem and a demand problem: on the one hand, they’re getting squeezed by costs, and on the other hand, their customers are getting squeezed and have less to spend.
Finally, looking at music venues, a lot of local artists have also been priced out of living in places like Toronto. You can’t get the talent that people want to see, because that talent can’t afford to live in the city. So what do you do for entertainment? A lot of people might say, “If I’m not going to go out, maybe I’ll just have people over, play board games, or what have you”.
That has become really difficult now, too, because we’ve got all these shoebox apartments and condos. Do I really want to have eight people over in a 450-square-foot place? Probably not.
Expensive housing is pushing socializing out of the home and into paid spaces, but those paid spaces are becoming more exclusive and harder to find.
We’re getting this doom loop happening where you think, “I can’t afford to have people over, but I also can’t afford to go out”. So what’s the answer? You just don’t see people.
Sabrina Maddeaux: I see that for sure with smaller spaces. Even in my condo, there’s not enough space to have a full dining table. I love hosting; I would love to have people over for dinner parties, but that’s just not going to happen. You can have people over, and they can graze or eat on their laps, but that’s not the same.
You see that throughout the city: the ability to have a dinner party or host a larger group of people is limited. I have a relatively large condo in an older building - it’s a two-bedroom plus den, so I’m very lucky. There are many people who wouldn’t be able to fit the number of people I can in my condo if I want to have people over for appetizers or a couple of drinks.
It’s certainly discouraging people from hosting. I have noticed over the years people hosting less and less. Those who do host tend to be older and own their homes, partly because they have space that can be a designated living room, dining room, or hosting space. When you have people over, it’s not like they’re having drinks and appetizers right next to your wardrobe in the corner. It’s just a completely different atmosphere.
Mike Moffatt: It really is. That’s a good segue to a piece that went viral on social media: Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic on why Americans stopped throwing dinner parties. This is not just a Canadian phenomenon, and it’s not just a Sabrina phenomenon. Across North America, the share of Americans who have friends or family over at least once a month has dropped by about 70% since the mid-1970s.
I remember the dinner parties my parents threw with some of that awful ‘70s and ‘80s food, like Jell-O moulds with weird food in them. Maybe we don’t want to totally go back to the past, but, Sabrina, you mentioned throwing dinner parties. When was the last time you hosted one, and could you expand on why we’re not seeing more of it now?
Sabrina Maddeaux: I haven’t hosted a proper dinner party without having the table and the sit-down. Even just having a really small kitchen in a condo, it’s hard to cook for a large group. I’ve had people over, though, and certainly thrown birthday parties where I put out appetizers and drinks, and I love doing that.
There’s an impact with friends, but you also see it with family. At my age, a generation ago you would host your parents or grandparents for Christmas or Thanksgiving, but now everyone my age always goes to the parents’ or grandparents’ home because they have the space.
I’ve actually read theories that a lot of older people don’t want to downsize because they feel they have to keep the home as the family gathering spot, so the kids can come home, have a bedroom to stay in, and have dinner.
It’s another doom loop where one thing leads into the other with cascading effects. In terms of the piece you mentioned, Thompson’s main explanation was busier dual-earner households, much more time spent on parenting, shrinking friend groups, and the home being so entertaining that nobody needs to invite anyone over anymore.
The reality is there are more options to entertain yourself alone these days. You don’t have to have a real person in your house - you can talk to an AI bot, watch Netflix, or scroll on TikTok, which more and more people are doing. There’s a class angle to it as well.
People without a college degree were among the most likely to say they hadn’t had anyone over all year, so having friends over is starting to look like a luxury. For young Canadians, a big missing piece is space, but the cost of attending or being hosted has risen as well. Bringing a host gift is more expensive, and getting across the city - whether by Uber, taxi, or transit - is more expensive and difficult. Everything adds up.
People are just staying in general, even if they’re not hosting, feeling it’s too expensive to leave the house.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. The housing story is a big part of it. You and I are very different people and probably have different expectations when we visit people. I’m more of a backyard barbecue guy, and that’s what we did.
That keeps costs low.
Sabrina Maddeaux: But Mike, there are no backyards, though.
Mike Moffatt: Well, that’s what I was going to get to: there are no backyards for your generation. For my generation, it was really cheap, particularly in the summer, because you’d make a bunch of hot dogs and hamburgers and everybody would bring some cheap beer. It was relatively inexpensive, but that necessitates having a backyard.
Those cheap get-togethers are harder to do now because we don’t have that green space at home. And that’s assuming young people even have a home of their own. In the 2021 census, more than a third of Canadians aged 20 to 34 lived with at least one parent; in the GTA as a whole, it was closer to half.
Not only do you not have a backyard, but you also don’t even have a home of your own, which makes it awkward having to ask mom and dad’s permission to host a dinner party or barbecue. And if you do have a home, it’s often not the kind of place where you can have a barbecue or even have people inside.
Looking at the types of homes being built today, back in the late ‘80s the average new Toronto condo size was about 1,000 square feet, so you could comfortably host quite a few people. That has shrunk over time, and over the last few years we’ve seen the advent of 450-square-foot investor shoebox condos. They don’t lend themselves well to having people over.
All of these factors around housing - the loss of backyards, the shrinking of apartment spaces, the shrinking of balconies - have made it really difficult to entertain.
Sabrina Maddeaux: That leads me to a term that keeps popping up: the alone economy, which refers to businesses built around people doing things by themselves. Is this just giving the market what people want, or is it something sadder?
Mike Moffatt: I think it’s a bit of both. Living alone is now the most common household type in Canada, and a lot of that is just people adapting to a new reality. That gives rise to things like single-serve groceries, solo dining, single-person travel deals, and so on.
A lot of people like living alone, but it does cause a certain level of inefficiency. When my then-girlfriend, now-wife and I moved in together, it was amazing because we went through our stuff and said, “Your coffee maker is nicer than mine, so we’ll keep that one”. We could get nice appliances and things like that because we were splitting the cost two ways, which creates efficiency. If you’re paying for things on your own, that crowds out spending - not just for nice appliances, but for things like cable TV, Wi-Fi, and so on.
By being able to couple up, you end up sharing a lot of costs, which certainly helps your ability to go out. But the economics of the era we’re living in have also caused a distributional issue where you’ve got things on the high end and things on the low end. We really do have a “missing middle.”
On the one end, we have super-premium events. You mentioned Taylor Swift, or you go to Vegas nowadays, and bottle service is thousands of dollars. You have this really high-end stuff, and on the other end, you have activities that are basically free because you’ve already paid the fixed cost: doomscrolling on TikTok, watching Netflix, or playing video games, most of which you do alone - especially if you don’t have the space to invite people over. You have this divide in reality, and what we’ve lost is that middle ground: inviting ten people over for a barbecue, the bowling league, the potluck, and so on.
Sabrina Maddeaux: It’s the missing middle of fun.
This really matters beyond just what it does to people’s weekends. StatCan found that nearly 1 in 4 Canadians aged 15 to 24 felt lonely always or often in 2021, and my guess is it has probably gotten worse since then. Canada already tracks loneliness as an official quality-of-life indicator, and the UK and Japan both have ministers for it.
Fewer friends also means things like fewer job leads, fewer relationships, and less trust in each other. When communities aren’t as close, that neighbourhood or village effect is gone. Those are economic costs even if they never show up on a receipt, as well as social costs to our cohesion as a healthy democracy where people care about each other.
There’s a through line to everything we cover on this show: a housing system that squeezes young people, with costs spilling into places you wouldn’t expect, like whether you can afford to see your friends or family.
Thompson ended his piece with a line I keep coming back to: “Not all progress is progress”. We have TikTok and scrolling, and in theory there’s more to do than ever, so we’ve moved forward; but we’ve also moved backward in a lot of ways on that very human front, which is showing up in the social data.
Mike Moffatt: I think so too. I’m glad you said it, because I don’t want to be the old guy saying how much better things were in the past, but this is definitely one area where the situation has gotten worse over the last 20 to 30 years. Let’s see what we can do to bring back the bowling alleys, bring back the live music venues, and make sure that your generation, and the ones younger than you, can go back to having fun.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about 1980s youth bowling leagues, please send us an email at [email protected].
Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
NetNewsLedger - Funflation is raising concert, sports and streaming costs for Canadians
Statistics Canada - Time pressure and time spent with friends over the last 30 years
Canadian Press - Canadians spending less time with friends
Statistics Canada - Canadian Social Survey: Loneliness in Canada (2021)
Asia Times - Asia’s lonely economy of one
Statistics Canada - Loneliness as a Quality of Life Framework indicator
Funded by the Neptis Foundation
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative
Given the abundance of free and low-cost entertainment options, this article is merely a platitude masking a sense of entitlement.