Before the Scroll: How Girls Actually Spent Their Free Time in the 90s and Early 2000s

This article may include affiliate links. We may earn a small commission if you shop through them.

Long before endless feeds and algorithm-fed content, being bored looked completely different. A recent thread asking women to remember what filled their hours before smartphones took over turned into a flood of nostalgia — thousands of comments packed with the small, tactile rituals that defined growing up in the 90s and early 2000s.

Reading through it feels like flipping through a time capsule: disposable cameras, mixtapes, landline marathons, and magazines that somehow gave an entire generation months’ worth of inspiration from a single issue. We collected the most-repeated memories and organized them below — consider it a love letter to the pre-scrolling era.

Magazine Culture Was Everything

• Waiting eagerly for the new issue to arrive and rereading it cover to cover
• Cutting pictures out for wall collages and scrapbooks
• Recreating outfits, jewelry, and hairstyles straight from the pages
• Practicing a smokey eye from a tutorial spread — just for fun, not even to wear out
• Taking every quiz printed inside
• Getting genuinely upset that fashion magazines today feel more like ad space than inspiration

Analog Communication Rituals

• Talking on the phone for hours, tying up the landline
• Trading notebooks back and forth with a best friend, each one filling in a page before passing it along
• Writing and mailing actual letters
• Getting a mixtape from a crush with a note like “this made me think of you”
• Diving into AOL chat rooms, Instant Messenger, and ICQ once the internet showed up at home
• Meeting people face-to-face at malls, cafes, and coffee shops instead of online

Creative & Just-Because Activities

• Keeping a diary and writing down everything you didn’t want to share out loud
• Writing songs or poems
• Making up dance routines to your favorite songs, copying moves off MTV
• Recording shows and music videos off the TV with a VCR or handheld camcorder
• Taping over-the-radio songs onto a cassette by launching across the room the second you heard the intro
• Building paper dolls, playing board games, and losing hours to Tetris

Getting Ready Just Because

• Painting your nails and experimenting with makeup for no particular occasion
• Raiding mom’s beauty cupboard — dyeing hair, trying on heels and blazers, snapping photos
• Doing multiple different makeup looks purely for fun

Getting Outside and Around Town

• Riding bikes or walking to a friend’s house, ringing the doorbell, and running off
• Walkie-talkie “dates” with best friends after bedtime
• Strolling through the city or window shopping — no online browsing involved
• Hanging out at the mall, the pool, or the local hangout spot and running into people you knew
• Playing M.A.S.H. with friends
• Flipping through shopping catalogs and circling everything you wanted with markers

Simply Being Bored (In a Good Way)

• Rearranging your bedroom or closet for something to do
• Daydreaming and fantasizing about crushes without any real information to go on
• Reading books for hours, being a certified bookworm
• Watching whatever was on TV, including random documentaries, just to pass the time

The common thread running through nearly every comment: life felt slower, more private, and more imaginative — filled with small rituals that didn’t need an audience. As one commenter put it, magazines were basically the original version of scrolling — just slower, more intentional, and a lot less crowded with strangers’ opinions.

What would you add to this list? The internet clearly isn’t done reminiscing.