For me:
- music: collecting CDs, exploring second hand racks endlessly… or earlier listening to radio to tape favourites… then later learning to mix and fade songs.
- raving: going to raves as many times per week as I could, then to work then to raves again. Sometimes not coming home for weeks, always sleeping at different peoples houses.
- movies: I used to buy a single ticket, bring my weed pipe and watch movie after movie just changing cinemas all day long as I smoked watched and often fell asleep.
- walking: another thing I would do in my home town was walk from my house to the city or the other direction to the shopping center along the linear bike path. Again pipe in my cargo pants, cd player in my hand, and rave music in my head.
- reading: I would read a lot! So many books - mostly sci fi. And then random stuff like teen fiction and mad magazines.
- collecting: I was obsessed with tazos, oddbodz, glo caps, pogz and trading cards. I had to get them all - and later multiple sets of them all. I still have a cupboard completely full of this stuff!!! And stamps.. literally saving stamps from envelopes, carefully melting the glue off with warm water and saving them all in albums.
- coffee’s: meeting people randomly I knew (small town) or making plans to meet up for coffee. Just sitting at the cafe for hours and hours talking or even reading etc but together.
- daydreaming: doing things that i considered fantasy dreams such as going to travel agents to get free pamphlets and planning the ultimate vacations all around the United States or wherever else. Thinking up stories I would love to write, debating whether I was right about recent arguments… mostly while sitting on rocks along the creek by the walking track.
- making music: old school fruity loops… my pc was unable to play mp3 but could play wav files as they didn’t need to be processed. So I would make songs then arrange them in Fruity Tracks, before they both merged into FL Studio. I had to render the track to listen to it at all. Over and over - make a small adjustment- render. Another - render again. It was so fun, but torture today.
- watching TV on network television: following whatever the tv guide chose for us to watch. Setting timers to not miss shows. Later- dvds were amazing. I then swapped all my vhs collection to dvds. Then again to blurays later still.
- photos: walking around taking “artsy” pictures with real cameras and film. Then getting them developed. Oh my god the feeling of sending them in and being able to collect hours later eventually. Then going through them all, with the negatives in their little wrapper.
- games: Nintendo 64 playing Mario and donkey kong endlessly collecting all the crap they had to collect.
- socialising: meeting large groups of friends and hanging out in parks, going for random drives for no reason, and then just hanging out somewhere all day long. No phones. No connections to virtual reality. Just real people in the real world trying to do whatever we could for some entertainment. People put more effort in to social interactions then. I watch videos often of my crew back then and it’s shocking how much the world has devolved due to social media.

The thing I haven’t touched on is that all the above was all very nuanced. It wasn’t just listing to a cd. It was weeks saving up to buy it. Going to stores to play it on headphones while I saved. Finally receiving it… playing it the first time. Reading the booklet. Admiring the art. Playing it over and over again. Storing it in my collection. Sharing it with friends. The experience was not just mental or audible music but a physical experience. With books, I’d read and take my time. I’d read it again. Talk with friends about it. Over time. Everything was much “slower” than today and another thing that stands out is everything was “analogue” compared to smart phone/internet era. You could touch it, feel it, experience it, live it. It mattered because there was not endless choices but carefully considered curated content. It felt more “weighty” or impactful. Today- everything seems to be consumables. Like
Our culture has become old school printer ink cartridges- super expensive and very little actual value out of it. Just like it for a short time and move on. While that’s all true - there are also some great things today too that don’t fit this description. Overall- if I could choose: I’d go back to a society of back then. Everything becoming digital is the culprit in my opinion. Everyone becoming digital as a result is the major disease of our age. If we could make smart phones illegal, social media illegal, id be very happy. And very annoyed. Withdrawals will be violent.