Those donuts were not free

This morning I ate Tim Bits for breakfast. Free Tim Bits, mind you. Well, “free” in the sense that I used my Tim Hortons points to get them. You know, those points I earned by spending actual money at Tim Hortons over the past few months. But somehow, in the magical world of loyalty programs, spending points feels completely different from spending cash.

Now - these Tim Bits weren’t actually free. I could have used those same points to buy chili – something that would have replaced an actual meal and saved me real money. Instead, I spent them on what I consider to be a treat, something i would have been less likely to spend cash on. So in effect, I had just spent money on Tim Bits, I’d just done it with extra steps and different currency.

Welcome to the wonderful world of consumer psychology and how it makes you feel smart while being played. Companies have figured out that if they can get us to think of their rewards as “play money,” we’ll spend it very differently than we spend real money. Tim Hortons isn’t alone in this game. Starbucks has convinced millions of us that stars are basically fairy dust. Airlines have made miles feel so abstract that we’ll blow 50,000 of them on an upgrade we’d never pay $400 cash for.

These companies have tapped into something fundamental about human psychology: we treat different types of currency differently, even when they represent the exact same value. It’s brilliant, really. Sneaky, but brilliant.

And we can’t just blame the corporations anymore. Because we play these same mind games with ourselves, with currencies that have nothing to do with loyalty programs or marketing departments.

Take time, for instance. I’ll happily binge-watch a chunk of a Netflix series in one weekend – hours of pure entertainment consumption. No guilt wha tsoever. It’s relaxation, right? But suggest I spend that same time on that weekend learning guitar, and suddenly my brain turns into an anxiety-ridden worrier. “If I’m going to spend time on this, I better become the next Eric Clapton by Tuesday… what if I don’t have natural talent, what if I discover I’m tone-deaf, what if my neighbors call the police while I am shredding Stairway to Heaven? I could just watch this show about competitive dog grooming instead - zero commitment required, zero chance of failure, and I’ll definitely finish all six seasons by Sunday night so at least I will have accomplished something.” Same currency - time - completely different mental accounting system. And then having selected a thing to do - even our attention operates on this dual currency system. We’ll scroll through social media or stream shows for hours, letting our focus get pulled in a thousand directions, because it feels like we’re not “spending” anything. But the moment we try to concentrate on something that might be more meaningful – reading a book, having a deep conversation, working on a creative project – suddenly we’re acutely aware of every distraction, and the mental effort required.

Now, you might be thinking about your own version of this. Maybe it’s vacation days. We’ll use up a week lying on a beach, and (rightly) call it self-care. But taking a single mental health day to reorganize our lives or tackle that project we’ve been avoiding? That feels indulgent, wasteful even. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that some uses of our time off are “free” while others have a cost.

Social energy works the same way. We’ll say yes to obligations we don’t really want to attend – that work happy hour, the neighbor’s housewarming, the 5th cousin once removed graduation party – because being agreeable feels “free.” But then we wonder why we’re exhausted and have no energy left for the people we actually want to see. We forget that saying yes to things means saying no to something else.

The truth is, we’re constantly earning and spending currencies we don’t even recognize as currencies. Our energy, our focus, our time, our social goodwill, our emotional bandwidth – these are all finite resources that we allocate throughout our lives. But because they don’t come with obvious price tags, we often spend them as carelessly as we might spend those “free” Tim Hortons points.

Maybe the real mind game isn’t what companies are doing to us – though they certainly are gaming our psychological systems. Maybe it’s the one we’re playing with ourselves. We’ve created these elaborate mental accounting systems where some forms of spending feel free and others feel expensive, where some investments in ourselves feel legitimate and others feel frivolous.

The loyalty program psychology works so well because it’s tapping into something we already do naturally. We compartmentalize value. We create different rules for different types of currency. We convince ourselves that some expenditures don’t really count.

So the next time you’re spending points instead of cash, or watching TV instead of reading, or saying yes when you want to say no, maybe ask yourself: which wallet am I spending from right now? And more importantly, what else could I have bought with this currency?

Because whether we’re talking about my ridiculous calorie-free Tim Bits this morning, or time itself, nothing is ever really free. We’re always spending something. The question is just whether we’re spending it intentionally.