The Best Entertainment Near You Doesn’t Cost a Thing

Entertainment doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. A park, a wildlife refuge, a public library, a lake or river access point, a clear night sky, these are already available to most people, and they’re often a better use of an afternoon than the costly alternatives we default to without thinking about it.

Start with the public library. There are more than 17,000 public library outlets across the country, and a library card gets you books, movies, music, research databases, and often programs and events, all for free. Parks and public land add to that. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages 573 national wildlife refuges, and the National Park System covers more than 400 units nationwide. A 2018 Trust for Public Land study found that about one in three Americans, over 100 million people, don’t have a quality park within a ten-minute walk of home. Checking what’s within a short drive often turns up more than people expect, a smaller neighborhood park, a river access point, a preserve a town or two over.

Time outside carries a real benefit beyond the price. A Stanford-led study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had one group walk 90 minutes through a natural setting and another group walk the same amount of time through an urban setting. The nature walkers showed a measurable drop in rumination, the kind of repetitive negative thinking tied to anxiety and depression, along with reduced blood flow to a brain region linked to that same rumination. Heart rate and breathing didn’t differ between the two groups, so the effect wasn’t just from the exercise itself, something about the setting mattered.

Leaving the phone behind adds another layer. A large randomized study published through the National Bureau of Economic Research paid people to deactivate Facebook for four weeks and found modest but measurable improvements in happiness, life satisfaction, and reported anxiety and depression. The effect wasn’t dramatic, but it was real and measured under controlled conditions, which is more than most claims about screen time can say. A walk, a few hours of birding, or an evening of stargazing with no phone in hand gets you both benefits at once.

This doesn't argue entirely against paying for entertainment. The average American household spends $3,609 a year on entertainment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 4.6% of total household spending. Some of that is well spent. The point is simpler, a meaningful share of what people pay for every week has a free or nearly free alternative sitting within reach, and it often does more for mood and stress than the paid version does. This can be especially meaningful when the economy is difficult.

A good financial decision isn’t always about cutting something out. Sometimes it’s about using what’s already available to you, a library card, a nearby trail, a clear sky on a weeknight, before defaulting to options that require spending.

If you want to think through how small shifts like this fit into your broader financial picture, reach out and we’ll talk it through.

Sources: Bratman et al., PNAS (2015); Allcott, Braghieri, Eichmeyer, and Gentzkow, NBER/American Economic Review (2020); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey (2024); IMLS Public Libraries Survey (FY2023); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Trust for Public Land ParkServe (2018).

Jay Sexton is a finance instructor, doctoral candidate in Personal Financial Planning, and owner of Sexton Finance. He writes about financial identity, as well as the practical, behavioral, and emotional dimensions of financial decision-making at sextonfinance.com.