When in the bathroom, the marketing and ingredients to all the shampoos were read.

Some tropes of the 80s and 90s: Teenagers ignoring their family while listening to a Walkman. Dads reading the newspaper and ignoring their family. Moms talking on the landline phone with friends and neighhbors. Nerds reading comic books. Dads playing golf. Mom shopping. Teens just “hanging out” at some random place like a parking lot, near a lake, under a bridge, behind the band hall, etc. Smoking. Crossword puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles. Cards.

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 used to interact physically with other people…

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.

Read.

Over the last two decades we have reduced the amount of time spent to get many of the items we need. Since we can now order online from our homes we don’t have to go out and get them, this frees up a reasonable chunk of time.

Also, over the last 50 or so years we have lost many 3rd places. A 3rd place is where you would spend your time that is not work or home. A bar, community center, an arcade…ect. those were a common place to spend time socializing.

Finally, items like reading and watching TV filled a lot of time. From reading the newspaper to getting the local news. Channel surfing was a big thing for a while. You would cycle through channels until you found something you wanted to watch, you could cycle channels for a while before finding something, so that took up a large chunk of time.

• Work more.
• Go to church.
• Go to a witch burning.
• Participate in a crusade.
• From which century are you asking?

I used to pull a random Encyclopedia off the shelf and find something interesting to read about.

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.

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.

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.

Reading, TV, video games, studying, crafts/hobbies

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.

Holy shit, I didn’t expect that question in <current year>, fuck I am old.