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When in the bathroom, the marketing and ingredients to all the shampoos were read.
We used to interact physically with other people..
Sometimes, you just had to suffer being bored. And it gave you time to really think.
Read books, read newspapers, chat on the land-line phone for hours.
Before the cliché of everyone being with their faces in smartphones there were clichés about husbands who do nothing but read newspapers all day, or teenage daughters that massively inflate the phone bill because she's talking with her friends for hours, or children with square eyes watching brain rotting cartoons all day.
We had something like e-readers and they didn't need recharging as they were made out of dead trees. But each one held just one book, so you had to take a bunch of them to the bathroom with you.
I remember reading any text i found while beeing on toilette when i was a kid(even shampoo ingredients).
Had conversations. Went outside. Did stuff. Had real hobbies. People were much less lame. Smartphones aren't even smart. They just have The internet. If they were smart, people wouldn't spend the entire time scrolling through dumb shit
I used to grab anything I could to read when taking a shit. Even reading shampoo bottle labels. Now I'm here typing this mess to you guys as I take a dump.
Read.
- Work more.
- Go to church.
- Go to a witch burning.
- Participate in a crusade.
- From which century are you asking?
Read a book, play card/board/video games, watch movies, listen to radio, go to a public space in your community (parks, squares, etc.)
Books before, still books.
Threw rocks at stuff.
Trains, signs, each other,
Peed off of tall stuff.
Ride bikes.
Try to build ramps for the bikes.
Crash the bikes.
Ask your mom for a popsicle cause you have a fat lip now from hitting your face on your bikes handlebars.
Generally dumb things.
Freak out cause the kid s few doors down got his hands on some dry ice.
But the dry ice in bottles.
Run away when that nosy old lady calls the police cause people are "making bombs"
I used to pull a random Encyclopedia off the shelf and find something interesting to read about.
Television was actually fun to watch. Magazines were actually fun to read. Video games were actually fun to play. Hell, playing outside was fun. Playing with toys was fun (even as an adult). Spending time with users on early internet forums was also very fun. Music was much more aesthetically pleasing to listen to (at least the hits of the 00s were, imo). We fidgeted with literally anything we could think of. Pens, rulers, balls (it's not what you think), toys, even our own fingers.
It was really easy to get bored back then too, but at least it was really easy to escape boredom back then.
We also were bored quite much. We also did lots of slightly less boring things like just runnung around, reading half bad books or learning assembler.
Listened to music. Hung out in a diner and had coffee & fries all night with friends. Hung out at the mall. Got drunk. Had sex.
Reading, TV, video games, studying, crafts/hobbies
I was getting my vehicle worked over recently. At the time I was listening to a podcast. A couple other people, probably early 50s were chatting. The old dude in the corner, likely around 70-80 was just sitting there hands empty, looking around, reading nothing like some kind of psychopath.
For 40 minutes.
He did nothing.
It was honestly rather impressive.
Windows Solitaire. Or, before Windows, Solitaire with actual playing cards.
Read books. Make stuff from said books Show friends the stuff you made from books. Drink beer and watch sports and other hobbys.
Playing outside a lot more, which was really fun. Hit the beach or swim docks and jumped off the highdives. Went camping. Bike adventures, etc. Lots more physical toys like nerf, Lego, beyblades, etc. CD music players, cassette music players, or MP3 music players, depending on the era.
People on the metro buses would read the paper to pass the time, listen to music, or read a book.
Back then, you could rent videos or games at a rental place, and there were many more physical hobby shops (there still are, but for live stuff, like aquariums now). Malls were a lot more alive and were true third places. Though even back then, I found people gorging themselves in a materialistic frenzy rather...distasteful. People still do it, just via Amazon and fast fashion online.
The biggest things I remember were how chill people were, the ubiquity of newspapers, smoking and cigarette holders outside, a lack of really any graffiti, and people being incredibly chill and a bit more open. There were also like, zero bike lanes or rail, so everyone drove everywhere.
You ever stand behind a couple of geezers in line somewhere and they start talking about some random stuff? They didn’t know each other. They were just bored.
Let me tell you a tale about downloading erotic jpeg files over 28k modems and stitching them back together, in which the image file was split into pieces, uuencoded and posted on Usenet.
In addition to reading ….
As a kid, we were constantly outside. In the summer, spend all day in the pool. Three seasons, in the woods. Any time, playing with neighbor kids. Winter, skiing, sledding, snow forts
Without doom scrolling, we had time for actual activities. Marathons of Risk or Monopoly. Assembling and painting scale models. Building, fixing, or repairing whatever needed it
Read books. Cereal boxes. Ride bikes and fuck around.
Holy shit, I didn't expect that question in , fuck I am old.
I mean, if you want an answer to that you could just stop using your smartphone for a few weeks and see what your brain comes up with. Here's a short list of some examples that were popular when I was a kid and smartphones did not exist yet:
Magazines, the daily newspaper, books, going out and exploring, shopping at malls, doing a hobby or craft, personal projects, television, chit-chatting with friends or even strangers, video games, puzzles, play with your pets, exercise, play sports, sitting quietly and being alone with your thoughts.
Ride bikes, go on adventures in the woods, break sticks, throw rocks in a pond, read books and encyclopedia, talk about wild imaginary adventures, see what can be hit with a BB gun
Born in the late 70s, I only recall being bored when my parents made me go to mass, or waiting while they did adult stuff like going to the bank.
Horsing around with my brother or playing with the Casio stopwatch kept us sane.
At home it was TV, Legos, music and bikes
Same thing I do now. TV, video games, find something to do with friends.
Gameboy and Walkmans
There wasn't so much boredom, because there were no smartphones.
It looks like a fair bit of it was TV-watching, which is now being displaced.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15224.jpeg
We were bored.
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