Comic books. And those weird bathroom readers.

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.

Counter-Strike

Read.

Books, same as I do now as well.

I take your point but I’d like to say I can’t remember being bored since I was a kid and that was because you were forced to and I’m 57 now.

I had a Game Boy, that got a lot of use.

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.

I read magazines, played videogames, watched TV, went “out and about”, browsed the net, etc.

We were bored.

I think I used to eat mud when I was bored.

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

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.

I had seventh generation game consoles before anyone I knew had a smartphone.

Cross-section books.

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.