I read a bunch, and played a lot of video games. I am on the older-end of Gen z, so smartphones only became a thing when I was older, so most of my childhood was spent on computers running a mix of windows 98, Windows XP, and eventually Linux, where I got most of my books and almost all my games.
Reading, TV, video games, studying, crafts/hobbies
Work more. Go to church. Go to a witch burning. Participate in a crusade. From which century are you asking?
Same thing I do now. TV, video games, find something to do with friends.
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, 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.
Child me draws. Adult me thinks.
I had a Game Boy, that got a lot of use.
When in the bathroom, the marketing and ingredients to all the shampoos were read.
Some people had magazine racks next to the toilet. There was a whole Seinfeld episode about George taking a book into the bathroom.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, new book annually, great way to pass the time on the toilet.
I think I used to eat mud when I was 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.
Cross-section books.
I read magazines, played videogames, watched TV, went “out and about”, browsed the net, etc.
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.
This reminds me of the time I checked out all the Dune books from the library, they were all hardbacks and the stack was nearly 2 feet high. The librarian was like, “You’re not going to read all that before they’re due” She was right but she let me check them all out anyway.
Readers Digest contained multiple books in one volume
Right. There were also Ace Doubles, but you had to be good at reading upside down if you wanted to use both halves.
They were abridged though.
Phone bad book gud
Literally complain about it while sitting on the couch bored
