This would be circa 1980’s – 90’s.. Rode bicycles, went to a dollar theater, arcade, read books, watched TV, played Nintendo, if you were old enough to have a car – drove around (yes, lets go for a ride was a thing), hang out and watch music videos. Oh yeah – and roller skating rink every week!
Starting in the 1920’s radio was around and people listened to radio.
Radio had programs like tv programs now. There were radio sitcoms and dramas and soap operas and mysteries. And people listened to the radio a lot.
In the 1950’s tv became somewhat common. People listened to the radio or watched tv.
Starting in the late 1970’s VCRs became available. People could now record shows to watch later or rent movies. So they watched tv but didn’t have to just watch what was on.
Until the 1970’s if you wanted to watch a show or movie it had to be showing at that time. But after that you could often rent the movie or show you wanted to see.
And that was the majority of it – radio, then tv, then videos.
People also listened to music, read magazines, and books. Magazines used to be very common and popular.
Rode bikes with friends, played baseball or catch, went to the park, played game boy/game gear, threw rocks in lakes or across creeks, climbed trees, played ditch em, tried to hit stuff with slingshots, jumped on the one trampoline in our friend group, and dreamt about dating our crush.
I grew up in the country, where our TV got two clear channels, PBS and CBS, along with two fuzzy ones, NBC and ABC. Which feels like saying I grew up in a tar paper shack with no flush toilets, but the truth is our house was pretty nice. It was just isolated.
Getting bored can be a blessing in disguise, since you get driven to new experiences to stop the boredom. We could ride our bikes down the dirt roads, play with toys, and imagine ourselves on great adventures.
A big one for me was reading. I went through hundreds of books in my childhood, and I think it was one of the best things that happened to me. Instead of listening to a quick snippet of advice or the most exciting part of a story, you had to build to that moment, as the writer constructed their argument or story one page at a time. It trains your mind to process information better than if you just get a quick video talking about something. (Not that this is putting down short Internet videos completely. If you want to learn something like unclogging your sink, you WANT a video that will waste no time showing you how.)
Having said that, there’s nothing quite as fun as being bored. You can ask yourself what is it you’d like to do, but never had the time. Something almost always comes up.
Went outside. If you were bored, you figured it out. Usually ended up going for a bike ride, found the house where the it her bikes were, and went into play.
My sisters and I would raid our mom’s closet put on her dresses and heels and create these elaborate soap operas. Pretty sure half the neighborhood could hear us dramatically yelling But Charles how could you? through the windows.
Other than as a young boy I wasn’t often bored. I lived in a small town in the Midwest, a nice town actually. I had a bicycle early on and had friends around town and we would go to the pool, play baseball or basketball, hang out at someone’s house, go to a movie on Saturday (25 cents). When I was younger, there were a bunch of kids in my neighborhood. We played outdoors year-round, but if the weather was terrible we played board games indoors or created “haunted houses” in someone’s basement. When dating life started I was even less bored. Honestly, great times!
I was born in ‘87, so the 90’s were pretty much my entire childhood.
I spent almost all of my free time either outside (neighborhood pool, bike riding, playing catch, exploring the woods) or inside playing action figures and legos. I also loved watching movies (VHS), especially Star Wars – at that time we just had the OG trilogy.
Video games were certainly a thing, but my parents could not afford them so I only played them at friend’s houses.
I always had books to read. Always had yard work to do. Always had friends to play games with. Always had errands to run. Always had schoolwork to keep up with.
The whole idea of being bored, even today, is foreign to me.
Books, outdoors, music, television, games, building things, and fixing things.
So, a lot like now but less convenient but also less annoying.
Real talk: If you are focused more on social media and doom scrolling internet than reading, music, outdoors, or even games, you really need to put it down and live your life. Even before the internet age, there were tabloids and gossip and nonsense. Go do something worthwhile!
I hated visiting my grandpas house. He was an old single man with other old single dudes. They would reuse old cups without washing them. He would leave me at home to go grocery shopping since he didn’t have a car.
Then, one day, I reached under his bed and found his stash of magazies. They weren’t the playboy variety. We’re talking about hustlers.
I threw it immediately back, worried that he would come back any minute. Then I went to his TV to see if he had sesame street. I pressed the VCR button only to find more Hustlers.
It was very dangerous to be bored back in the 90s.
I was never, ever bored, nor were any of the kids I knew. (I’m 67).
I read – mostly nonfiction, so I learned a lot of history and how to do things. I did a lot of crafts. I rode my bike, worked in the garden, played with my dog, went down to the city pool to swim, played various games with the neighbor kids.
A kid who complained to his parents that he was “bored” was likely to be ordered to clean out the garage or some other unpleasant task.
I played outside a lot but I’d like to talk about my grandma here. My grandmother was a 107 years old when she died in 2002. When I was a teenager in the early 1990’s she would tell me stories (every night at 9pm she had a double Irish whisky over the rocks before going to bed and she’d get chatty) about seeing the first cars (horseless carriages) or seeing a tv for the first time. Color TV was a “mind blown” moment for her. Back then I took these stories for granted and didn’t pay much attention, as teenagers do. But now that I’m nearing 50 I wish I could go back, pour her a whisky, and listen and ask questions. The woman had a life. When she was a teenager, her and her family crossed the US in a wagon! I wish I knew more details than that. I know it was her duty to help prepare food during the excursion.. When I was a little little kid she helped me build a treehouse and she was in her 80’s then! She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met. Had a lot funny sayings. She called toilet paper “rolled up shit paper” lol
Played the video game I rented for the weekend solely based on how the cover art and the 3 screenshots at the back looked. Was always a hit or miss. And the damn games were heartless back then (oh, you died? Let’s try that again. From the start ).
Consulted specific sections of the Sears catalog while mom and dad were away.
Found were my friends were based on which house had they bikes laying in the front yard.
Ran my bike and came back home for lunch/dinner.
Went to the Library.
Went to the shopping mall with friends, and pranked older people / did stupidity stuff (so happy to say that none of it on the internet 🤣).
Waited next to the radio for my favorites songs to come on so that I cloud hit Play/Rec on my stereo to record it on tape.
Read cereal boxes or shampoo bottles (based on whether I was in the dinning room or bathroom)
Blockbuster, $2 movies theater, walking in the woods, baseball, swimming, gymnastics, video games, arcade, Lazer tag, hide and go seek, board games, cards
The only difference is people didn’t have cellphones basically
Played outside from dawn till dusk all summer long. Rode bikes EVERYWHERE. We swam in lakes, creeks and swimming holes. Listened to music on my transistor radio with an ear piece in MONO. Read a massive number of books which made me a top student in school, I could spell, write a sentence and write paragraphs. Did crafts like macrame, crocheting, sewing, built tree houses and forts out of junk we found, made go karts. We also played card games like Canasta and board games like Life, Monopoly, Clue, Sorry, chess and checkers.
I think what a lot of young people don’t realize is that 40 years ago when I was a teen we had everything they have now but it was in tangible format. Want to make a call? We had pay phones. Want to know what your favorite celeb was up to? We had Teen Beat/Tiger Beat/People etc. Got a book report due? We had encyclopedias. News? We had newspapers.
For fun we rode out bikes for miles to meet up with friends. Once we could drive we drove for miles to hang out with friends. Video rental places were on every corner so your choice was go to the mov8es for $4, go to the $1 cinema, or wait to rent it on video.
When we say our parents had no clue where we were our parents had NO CLUE where we were. Most of them were working anyway so we were latchkey kids. We raised ourselves and at best hung out at that friends house whose mom didn’t work. We were all raised by someone else’s parents
gather up our friends and played baseball in an old lot.
stole a nickel out of mom’s purse, went to the hardware store and bought 1 fish hook. Flipped the old mattress in the lot across the street and collected the worms and went fishing in the local creek.
Rode our bikes everywhere
Walked (hiked) in the woods. Followed railroad tracks. Climbed every tree in sight.
Dig holes, rip up grass, ride bikes, play in the creek, ride bikes again, go to the neighborhood pool, run around in the forest, build forts, make up games, sidewalk chalk, sprinklers and playing with the house hose, play with rocks, knock on neighborhood kids doors to go ride more bikes.
Ride bikes, pick berries, read books, shoot guns or bows, get stoned with friends after a certain age, go to parties where people were just there without a phone on them at all times, which means that we had to make friends or else we would just be staring around. Go swimming, go fishing, meet girls because we were physically in the same space and could feel the chemistry without constant distraction or possible escape via phone. Drop acid at the beach. Be in silence when walking alone. Become comfortable in silent reflection. Honestly in a lot of ways, I would say most, it was better. Certainly better for socialization and mental health.
Go outside. Hang out with friends. Go to the movies/arcade/malls. Road bikes. Swimming. Parks.
Different things depending on ages.
Just so you know, those of us who are Gen-X were pretty much feral during the 80’s and the 90’s. Our parents didn’t care where we were/did/went as long as we were home for dinner, didn’t get arrested and there were no broken bones.
Watch Stand By Me, Goonies and almost any 80s/90s teen related movies.
Used to roller skate around the neighborhood with my Walkman blasting Madonna. My dad would yell at me for wasting batteries, but those sunset skating sessions were worth every penny I spent at Radio Shack.
There was a girl about my age who lived two houses up the road. I would go over and ring the bell. If she was home, we would play in the yard (we each had a swing set) or go to an empty lot and build forts out of whatever trash had been dumped. We were so excited one time we found some old rusty bed springs and that made a wall, a couple old pallets made another wall. It was fun, but it was a good thing we were both up to date on our tetanus vaccines.
So I can really only speak to the 90s because I am not that old. I was alive in the 80s but not really my own person yet.
We’d play sports like basketball, soccer, football, street hockey, or skateboarding. I was kind of a nerd, but we still did these things.
We’d go to the comic book shop and have conversations about our favorite superheros, who would win in a fight etc.
We played a lot card games, I mean games like poker and gin, but Magic The Gathering and Pokémon got popular in the late 90s.
We did play video games and computer games, but we had more in person parties with them. For consoles for the most part you would watch someone play, because they only had 1-2 player games. Part of what made Nintendo-64 so revolutionary was that it was the first console to support 4 simultaneous players. This made console gaming a lot more fun with friends. Also LAN parties were really huge. We would lug our massive heavy computers to a friend’s house and set up so we could play multi-player games together. By the late 90s games were starting to support online multi-player too, but lag was a serious and constant issue. I don’t mean just like bad ping time like you get today. People would frequently disconnect, the game would pause at the worst moment, and more complex multi-player could be almost impossible. LAN parties meant no lag, so you got none of this.
I can’t understate the significance of the mall scene though. It’s something really difficult for people today to fully understand. The mall was THE third space. People were always hanging out at malls especially, music stores, skate board shops, comic shops, book stores (yes, really), sporting goods stores, and food courts. People were way more comfortable with loitering and not actually buying anything.
listened to wax cylinders on the wind-up gramophone, read news about the newly discovered Egyptian tombs in the periodicals; visited Tutenkhamun’s exhibition at the newly-opened Ally Pally.
Went outside. Called up a friend. Went outside some more.
Read books. Lots of books. Rented a VHS tape to watch.
Board games like Risk.
Also, boredom wasn’t something like it is now: an existential crisis. To be avoided like the plague. It was a fact of life that there would be period where you would be bored. And that was ok.
Boredom was priced in.
I use to build pyramid or go mammoth hunting , depend on the day of the week (we only have 4 day in the week back then , I remember when we burn alive the man who invent Friday , the fire was invented the day before)
We survived boredom the old-fashioned way: by being bored. And then doing something about it. Like throwing rocks at cans, walking to the store for a soda, or rewinding a cassette with a pencil. If we were really desperate, we’d read the back of a cereal box.
To anyone old enough to properly remember the 20th century, “the 1900s” means the decade from 1900 to 1909.
I was born in 1967. We watched TV, we read books, we hung out with our friends, we sometimes played board games. We also accepted that sometimes we’d be bored and it wouldn’t kill us, so we tolerated it well.
Drugs, sex, parties that had drugs, sex and booze. Running from cops when said parties got raided. Played video games. Built stuff. Made up games. Read books. Went to concerts and movies, listened to a metric fuckton of music. Hung out at coffeehouses and had “deep” convos well into the early hours of the morning. Went to the beach, surfed…badly. Skated. Hung out at the mall, played guitar/had a band. Idk, I never ran out of stuff to do. Basically we lived in the real world and interacted with each other in person.
One of my favorite pastimes was filling a plastic bottle with gasoline and lighting it on fire. The bottle would melt and the flames would spread over the driveway. It was fun. Sometimes I would just break rocks with a hammer. When you have nothing to do you find stuff to do, and since you’re used to having nothing to do, mundane things are entertaining.
Art, photography, reading, hanging with friends, going to arcades and dancing at clubs at least once a week.
As a young kid, playing outside, roller skating, riding my bike, reading, playing board games, arcades and playing Atari, doing Fashion Plates and Mad Libs, listening to Casey Casem’s top 40 and going to movies and watching a LOT of tv
Have you seen the movie Skinamarink? That movie transported me back to my childhood when my parents and I would visit an aunt or uncle or something like that.
Your choices were:
Read a book.
Go outside and poke bugs with a stick.
Watch old cartoons on tv.
Comments
Watch TV
Played outside/ got in trouble.
played chess. screwed.
1900s lol
there is already internet then. also console games
This would be circa 1980’s – 90’s.. Rode bicycles, went to a dollar theater, arcade, read books, watched TV, played Nintendo, if you were old enough to have a car – drove around (yes, lets go for a ride was a thing), hang out and watch music videos. Oh yeah – and roller skating rink every week!
Starting in the 1920’s radio was around and people listened to radio.
Radio had programs like tv programs now. There were radio sitcoms and dramas and soap operas and mysteries. And people listened to the radio a lot.
In the 1950’s tv became somewhat common. People listened to the radio or watched tv.
Starting in the late 1970’s VCRs became available. People could now record shows to watch later or rent movies. So they watched tv but didn’t have to just watch what was on.
Until the 1970’s if you wanted to watch a show or movie it had to be showing at that time. But after that you could often rent the movie or show you wanted to see.
And that was the majority of it – radio, then tv, then videos.
People also listened to music, read magazines, and books. Magazines used to be very common and popular.
GameBoy
Movies/tv and video games existed
Well the 1900s was a span of 100 years so you’re gonna have to be more specific.
Ookkatuk would usually throw rock at Deer skull, then Urrgha would eat dirt and we would all dream of inventing fire.
Rode bikes with friends, played baseball or catch, went to the park, played game boy/game gear, threw rocks in lakes or across creeks, climbed trees, played ditch em, tried to hit stuff with slingshots, jumped on the one trampoline in our friend group, and dreamt about dating our crush.
Go to the pub and enjoy a pint for a pound (or so).
Watch TV. In the office, talk about TV (fewer channels, everyone was watching the same stuff).
Read. Go for walk.
In my case though I may have been an outlier :
Browse Usenet (early 90s).
Hand-code my website on the WWW using bare HTML (late 90s ;).
Come up with ideas like the internet so people could use it to ask stupid questions on platforms like this 😝.
I grew up in the country, where our TV got two clear channels, PBS and CBS, along with two fuzzy ones, NBC and ABC. Which feels like saying I grew up in a tar paper shack with no flush toilets, but the truth is our house was pretty nice. It was just isolated.
Getting bored can be a blessing in disguise, since you get driven to new experiences to stop the boredom. We could ride our bikes down the dirt roads, play with toys, and imagine ourselves on great adventures.
A big one for me was reading. I went through hundreds of books in my childhood, and I think it was one of the best things that happened to me. Instead of listening to a quick snippet of advice or the most exciting part of a story, you had to build to that moment, as the writer constructed their argument or story one page at a time. It trains your mind to process information better than if you just get a quick video talking about something. (Not that this is putting down short Internet videos completely. If you want to learn something like unclogging your sink, you WANT a video that will waste no time showing you how.)
Having said that, there’s nothing quite as fun as being bored. You can ask yourself what is it you’d like to do, but never had the time. Something almost always comes up.
playing around with the neighbors, flying a kite, and swimming in the river.
When I was bored in the 1900s I rode a penny farthing bicycle, went to the new bioscope and wore a top hat.
Went outside. If you were bored, you figured it out. Usually ended up going for a bike ride, found the house where the it her bikes were, and went into play.
Touched grass.
My sisters and I would raid our mom’s closet put on her dresses and heels and create these elaborate soap operas. Pretty sure half the neighborhood could hear us dramatically yelling But Charles how could you? through the windows.
Other than as a young boy I wasn’t often bored. I lived in a small town in the Midwest, a nice town actually. I had a bicycle early on and had friends around town and we would go to the pool, play baseball or basketball, hang out at someone’s house, go to a movie on Saturday (25 cents). When I was younger, there were a bunch of kids in my neighborhood. We played outdoors year-round, but if the weather was terrible we played board games indoors or created “haunted houses” in someone’s basement. When dating life started I was even less bored. Honestly, great times!
I was born in ‘87, so the 90’s were pretty much my entire childhood.
I spent almost all of my free time either outside (neighborhood pool, bike riding, playing catch, exploring the woods) or inside playing action figures and legos. I also loved watching movies (VHS), especially Star Wars – at that time we just had the OG trilogy.
Video games were certainly a thing, but my parents could not afford them so I only played them at friend’s houses.
It was great.
If there wasn’t a magazine in the bathroom, we were reading the shampoo bottle.
there was this little thing called TV
I was never bored.
I always had books to read. Always had yard work to do. Always had friends to play games with. Always had errands to run. Always had schoolwork to keep up with.
The whole idea of being bored, even today, is foreign to me.
Books, outdoors, music, television, games, building things, and fixing things.
So, a lot like now but less convenient but also less annoying.
Real talk: If you are focused more on social media and doom scrolling internet than reading, music, outdoors, or even games, you really need to put it down and live your life. Even before the internet age, there were tabloids and gossip and nonsense. Go do something worthwhile!
Spent a lot of time in my treehouse and constantly tried to “upgrade” it lol
Jesus Christ.
One modern 21st century trend is putting the century in front of everything.
Oh you were born in the 1980s?
No I was born in the 80s.
Nobody alive is gonna mistake 80s for 1880s or 2080s.
End rant. Get it together z alpha.
I feel attacked 😄
If we were bored, our parents gave us something to do.
I watched the same movies over and over on VHS. I must have watched Lion King like 30 times.
i asked my wife and she didn’t have a good answer so she suggested our 15 children
I’m from the latter half of the 1900s and I played in dirt. Of course, we were lucky to have dirt at that point. Our elders are older than dirt.
I hated visiting my grandpas house. He was an old single man with other old single dudes. They would reuse old cups without washing them. He would leave me at home to go grocery shopping since he didn’t have a car.
Then, one day, I reached under his bed and found his stash of magazies. They weren’t the playboy variety. We’re talking about hustlers.
I threw it immediately back, worried that he would come back any minute. Then I went to his TV to see if he had sesame street. I pressed the VCR button only to find more Hustlers.
It was very dangerous to be bored back in the 90s.
I watched considerably more TV than what I do now.
Wear an onion on my belt and buy five bees for a nickle
I was never, ever bored, nor were any of the kids I knew. (I’m 67).
I read – mostly nonfiction, so I learned a lot of history and how to do things. I did a lot of crafts. I rode my bike, worked in the garden, played with my dog, went down to the city pool to swim, played various games with the neighbor kids.
A kid who complained to his parents that he was “bored” was likely to be ordered to clean out the garage or some other unpleasant task.
I love how this is worded. Now get off my lawn.
I played outside a lot but I’d like to talk about my grandma here. My grandmother was a 107 years old when she died in 2002. When I was a teenager in the early 1990’s she would tell me stories (every night at 9pm she had a double Irish whisky over the rocks before going to bed and she’d get chatty) about seeing the first cars (horseless carriages) or seeing a tv for the first time. Color TV was a “mind blown” moment for her. Back then I took these stories for granted and didn’t pay much attention, as teenagers do. But now that I’m nearing 50 I wish I could go back, pour her a whisky, and listen and ask questions. The woman had a life. When she was a teenager, her and her family crossed the US in a wagon! I wish I knew more details than that. I know it was her duty to help prepare food during the excursion.. When I was a little little kid she helped me build a treehouse and she was in her 80’s then! She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met. Had a lot funny sayings. She called toilet paper “rolled up shit paper” lol
smoke weed, have sex, form a punk band, sing “SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL”
That’s about it.
Hitch up the Ole dog sled and head for town……
Cocaine. You didn’t have to test it or stress it. It was kinda socially acceptable too.
Also, MDMA
We invented raves you know.
Blockbuster, $2 movies theater, walking in the woods, baseball, swimming, gymnastics, video games, arcade, Lazer tag, hide and go seek, board games, cards
The only difference is people didn’t have cellphones basically
Played outside from dawn till dusk all summer long. Rode bikes EVERYWHERE. We swam in lakes, creeks and swimming holes. Listened to music on my transistor radio with an ear piece in MONO. Read a massive number of books which made me a top student in school, I could spell, write a sentence and write paragraphs. Did crafts like macrame, crocheting, sewing, built tree houses and forts out of junk we found, made go karts. We also played card games like Canasta and board games like Life, Monopoly, Clue, Sorry, chess and checkers.
I think what a lot of young people don’t realize is that 40 years ago when I was a teen we had everything they have now but it was in tangible format. Want to make a call? We had pay phones. Want to know what your favorite celeb was up to? We had Teen Beat/Tiger Beat/People etc. Got a book report due? We had encyclopedias. News? We had newspapers.
For fun we rode out bikes for miles to meet up with friends. Once we could drive we drove for miles to hang out with friends. Video rental places were on every corner so your choice was go to the mov8es for $4, go to the $1 cinema, or wait to rent it on video.
When we say our parents had no clue where we were our parents had NO CLUE where we were. Most of them were working anyway so we were latchkey kids. We raised ourselves and at best hung out at that friends house whose mom didn’t work. We were all raised by someone else’s parents
gather up our friends and played baseball in an old lot.
stole a nickel out of mom’s purse, went to the hardware store and bought 1 fish hook. Flipped the old mattress in the lot across the street and collected the worms and went fishing in the local creek.
Rode our bikes everywhere
Walked (hiked) in the woods. Followed railroad tracks. Climbed every tree in sight.
etc
Im a millennial, not an old person. Watch your mouth lol
Dig holes, rip up grass, ride bikes, play in the creek, ride bikes again, go to the neighborhood pool, run around in the forest, build forts, make up games, sidewalk chalk, sprinklers and playing with the house hose, play with rocks, knock on neighborhood kids doors to go ride more bikes.
And do you think the internet and social media is the only entertainment?
Ride bikes, pick berries, read books, shoot guns or bows, get stoned with friends after a certain age, go to parties where people were just there without a phone on them at all times, which means that we had to make friends or else we would just be staring around. Go swimming, go fishing, meet girls because we were physically in the same space and could feel the chemistry without constant distraction or possible escape via phone. Drop acid at the beach. Be in silence when walking alone. Become comfortable in silent reflection. Honestly in a lot of ways, I would say most, it was better. Certainly better for socialization and mental health.
We played with our pet dragons, and experimented with time travel.
Y’know, just like normal kids.
Are you kidding? I’m more bored now more of the time, but I’m not complaining.
Played sports outside with friends. Went to mall, just went wandering around the woods (not a trail) seeing what we could find.
Once old enough to drive we went to the mall and hit on chicks from other schools (unsuccessfully).
It was great.
Go outside. Hang out with friends. Go to the movies/arcade/malls. Road bikes. Swimming. Parks.
Different things depending on ages.
Just so you know, those of us who are Gen-X were pretty much feral during the 80’s and the 90’s. Our parents didn’t care where we were/did/went as long as we were home for dinner, didn’t get arrested and there were no broken bones.
Watch Stand By Me, Goonies and almost any 80s/90s teen related movies.
Used to roller skate around the neighborhood with my Walkman blasting Madonna. My dad would yell at me for wasting batteries, but those sunset skating sessions were worth every penny I spent at Radio Shack.
There was a girl about my age who lived two houses up the road. I would go over and ring the bell. If she was home, we would play in the yard (we each had a swing set) or go to an empty lot and build forts out of whatever trash had been dumped. We were so excited one time we found some old rusty bed springs and that made a wall, a couple old pallets made another wall. It was fun, but it was a good thing we were both up to date on our tetanus vaccines.
Simple. Read books from public library; talked with friends; went to friends house for talk and chat.
So I can really only speak to the 90s because I am not that old. I was alive in the 80s but not really my own person yet.
We’d play sports like basketball, soccer, football, street hockey, or skateboarding. I was kind of a nerd, but we still did these things.
We’d go to the comic book shop and have conversations about our favorite superheros, who would win in a fight etc.
We played a lot card games, I mean games like poker and gin, but Magic The Gathering and Pokémon got popular in the late 90s.
We did play video games and computer games, but we had more in person parties with them. For consoles for the most part you would watch someone play, because they only had 1-2 player games. Part of what made Nintendo-64 so revolutionary was that it was the first console to support 4 simultaneous players. This made console gaming a lot more fun with friends. Also LAN parties were really huge. We would lug our massive heavy computers to a friend’s house and set up so we could play multi-player games together. By the late 90s games were starting to support online multi-player too, but lag was a serious and constant issue. I don’t mean just like bad ping time like you get today. People would frequently disconnect, the game would pause at the worst moment, and more complex multi-player could be almost impossible. LAN parties meant no lag, so you got none of this.
I can’t understate the significance of the mall scene though. It’s something really difficult for people today to fully understand. The mall was THE third space. People were always hanging out at malls especially, music stores, skate board shops, comic shops, book stores (yes, really), sporting goods stores, and food courts. People were way more comfortable with loitering and not actually buying anything.
1900s? Those are fighting words
1900s took me a moment but that really is how dates work huh
One tattered porn magazine in a culvert would entertain a whole neighborhood for months.
AOL.
A/S/L?
PEAK life was in the 1990’s.
Enough tech but not too much to infiltrates our lives.
I was particularly fond of banging your mom, young person.
listened to wax cylinders on the wind-up gramophone, read news about the newly discovered Egyptian tombs in the periodicals; visited Tutenkhamun’s exhibition at the newly-opened Ally Pally.
Set things on fire.
Went outside. Called up a friend. Went outside some more.
Read books. Lots of books. Rented a VHS tape to watch.
Board games like Risk.
Also, boredom wasn’t something like it is now: an existential crisis. To be avoided like the plague. It was a fact of life that there would be period where you would be bored. And that was ok.
Boredom was priced in.
I use to build pyramid or go mammoth hunting , depend on the day of the week (we only have 4 day in the week back then , I remember when we burn alive the man who invent Friday , the fire was invented the day before)
We rode our bikes wherever we wanted to. All we craved was freedom.
We survived boredom the old-fashioned way: by being bored. And then doing something about it. Like throwing rocks at cans, walking to the store for a soda, or rewinding a cassette with a pencil. If we were really desperate, we’d read the back of a cereal box.
Went to the library and took out a pile of books. 📚 Repeat.
We had TV but you could not pick what to watch. You just watched whatever was on.
We had video games like Nintendo, etc.and some computer games.
We rode bikes around the neighborhood.
We knocked on our neighbors doors and asked them to come outside and play.
We played board games. Before video games this was probably what we did a lot as an indoor activity.
We had a neighborhood pool club and we would go everyday in the summers.
We shot BB guns at each other and bought candy cigarettes from some rando in a big white van. But man, hose water just hit different.
Got bored. Turns out actually getting bored is a lost luxury we didn’t know we had.
“1900s” LOL!
To anyone old enough to properly remember the 20th century, “the 1900s” means the decade from 1900 to 1909.
I was born in 1967. We watched TV, we read books, we hung out with our friends, we sometimes played board games. We also accepted that sometimes we’d be bored and it wouldn’t kill us, so we tolerated it well.
Old people? 1900s? Go to hell, kid.
I’d tell OP to f’off but I think my reddit account is older than they are.
As a 44 year old, this post title fills me with the rage of a thousand exploding suns and OP is the devil.
Drugs, sex, parties that had drugs, sex and booze. Running from cops when said parties got raided. Played video games. Built stuff. Made up games. Read books. Went to concerts and movies, listened to a metric fuckton of music. Hung out at coffeehouses and had “deep” convos well into the early hours of the morning. Went to the beach, surfed…badly. Skated. Hung out at the mall, played guitar/had a band. Idk, I never ran out of stuff to do. Basically we lived in the real world and interacted with each other in person.
One of my favorite pastimes was filling a plastic bottle with gasoline and lighting it on fire. The bottle would melt and the flames would spread over the driveway. It was fun. Sometimes I would just break rocks with a hammer. When you have nothing to do you find stuff to do, and since you’re used to having nothing to do, mundane things are entertaining.
I’m actually crying laughing with it being called the 1900s. There’s real tears hahahahahaha
Art, photography, reading, hanging with friends, going to arcades and dancing at clubs at least once a week.
As a young kid, playing outside, roller skating, riding my bike, reading, playing board games, arcades and playing Atari, doing Fashion Plates and Mad Libs, listening to Casey Casem’s top 40 and going to movies and watching a LOT of tv
If you were alive In 1900 you are now dead….125 years …..
Have you seen the movie Skinamarink? That movie transported me back to my childhood when my parents and I would visit an aunt or uncle or something like that.
Your choices were:
Read a book.
Go outside and poke bugs with a stick.
Watch old cartoons on tv.
It was endless, soul sucking boredom.
NOW GO AWAY AND BE QUIET THE GROWNUPS ARE TALKING
Did whatever I felt like and was never recorded doing it
Lol bored. They hadn’t invented the word yet.
kids these days will never understand cave paintings.
Calling it the 1900’s seems ridiculous to me.
Fuck off with the ageism