Remember that peculiar mix of grass stains and sunscreen that seemed to cling to your skin all summer? The way your feet would turn black from running barefoot on hot pavement, only to be scrubbed raw in the bath later?
If you can still recall the specific boredom of a Tuesday afternoon in July, with nothing but three TV channels and a bike with a wonky chain, you might be part of the last generation that truly understood what it meant to have nothing to do.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, especially after watching my friend’s kids navigate their summer holidays. They’re scheduled within an inch of their lives – coding camps, sports clinics, organized playdates. When I mentioned that my summers growing up outside Manchester consisted mainly of kicking a football against a wall for hours, they looked at me like I’d described living in a cave.
But here’s what struck me: we weren’t deprived. We had something they’ll never experience – genuine, soul-crushing, creativity-sparking boredom. And looking back, I’m starting to think we were the lucky ones.
1. Waiting by the radio to record your favorite song
You’d sit there for hours, finger poised over the record button, ready to capture that one song on a blank cassette tape. The DJ would talk over the intro, and you’d curse under your breath, but you’d take what you could get.
This wasn’t just about music. It was about patience, anticipation, and making do with imperfection. You’d listen to the same tape until the ribbon wore thin, memorizing every skip and warble. That song meant something because you’d invested time in capturing it.
These days, every song ever recorded sits in our pockets. Brilliant for convenience, but we’ve lost that sense of musical treasure hunting. When everything’s available instantly, nothing feels quite as precious.
2. Having absolutely no way to contact your parents all day
You’d leave the house after breakfast and your parents wouldn’t hear from you until dinner. No texts, no check-ins, no Find My iPhone. Just you, your mates, and the understanding that you’d better be home when the streetlights came on.
This wasn’t neglect – it was normal. It taught us independence in a way that’s hard to replicate now. When you scraped your knee, you figured out whether it needed attention or whether you could keep playing. When plans fell through, you improvised.
I remember getting lost once trying to find a friend’s house in a part of town I didn’t know well. No Google Maps, no phone call for help. Just asking strangers for directions and eventually finding my way. That small victory felt enormous.
3. The TV signing off at midnight
The national anthem would play, then nothing but static until morning. Television had actual boundaries. It ended. You couldn’t binge-watch anything because the concept didn’t exist.
This forced rhythm on our days. Evening entertainment had a natural conclusion, and then you had to find something else to do or actually go to sleep. My grandmother used to say the TV needed to rest too, and in a way, she was right. We all did.
There was something almost ceremonial about it. That moment when the presenter would say goodnight and the screen would go dark felt like the whole country was being tucked into bed together.
4. Planning meetups without any way to change them
“See you at the park at 2” meant you showed up at the park at 2. No “running 10 minutes late” texts. No last-minute cancellations via WhatsApp. If someone didn’t show, you waited a reasonable amount of time, then assumed something important had come up.
This made us reliable in a different way. Your word meant something because changing plans required actual effort – finding a phone box, having the right change, knowing the number. So mostly, you just showed up when you said you would.
The uncertainty could be frustrating, but it also meant truly unexpected encounters. You’d go to meet one friend and find five others there. Plans evolved organically because nobody could coordinate any other way.
5. Having only your imagination during long car journeys
No tablets, no phones, no DVD players mounted in headrests. Just you, the window, and whatever games you could invent. I spent countless hours imagining a figure running alongside our car, jumping over obstacles, never touching the ground.
These journeys felt endless. “Are we there yet?” wasn’t just a cliché – it was a genuine plea born from the unique torture of having nothing to do but watch England’s motorways crawl by.
But in that nothingness, our minds did extraordinary things. We made up stories, played word games, actually talked to our families. My father would tell stories about his work at the factory, union meetings, struggles I was too young to fully understand but which planted seeds about fairness and power that grew as I did.
6. Reading the same books over and over
You owned maybe a dozen books if you were lucky. The library was a bike ride away and only open certain hours. So you read what you had, repeatedly, until the pages were soft and certain passages were memorized.
This repetition gave us depth instead of breadth. I knew those books inside out – every character, every plot twist, every description. They became part of my mental furniture in a way that’s hard to achieve when you’re racing through a different book every week.
When you finally got a new book, it was an event. Birthday and Christmas lists were dominated by specific titles you’d been wanting for months. That anticipation, that delayed gratification, made the reading experience itself more intense.
7. Understanding that photographs were finite and precious
Twenty-four exposures on a roll of film. Maybe thirty-six if you were feeling flush. You couldn’t see what you’d taken until days later when the prints came back from Boots. Half of them would be blurry or badly framed, and that was just accepted.
This scarcity made us selective. You didn’t photograph your lunch or take seventeen shots to get the right angle. Photos marked genuine occasions – holidays, birthdays, school plays. The rest of life just happened without documentation.
Waiting to see how photos turned out was its own kind of anticipation. Opening that envelope was like unwrapping a present, never quite knowing what you’d find. Even the disasters were kept – the thumb over the lens, the accidental ground shot – because throwing away photos felt wrong somehow.
The bottom line
I’m not saying everything was better then. I quite like being able to reach my friends instantly and having the world’s information in my pocket. But something valuable was lost when we eliminated boredom from childhood.
Those empty hours taught us to create our own entertainment, to be comfortable with our own thoughts, to find fascination in small things. We learned patience not through lesson but through necessity. We developed independence because we had no choice.
Today’s kids might never know the specific tedium of a rainy Sunday with nothing to do, but they’ll also never know the sweet relief when boredom finally broke – when a friend knocked on the door unexpectedly, when you found something interesting in the shed, when your imagination finally kicked in and transformed the living room into a spaceship.
That’s what true boredom gave us: the space to discover what we were capable of when left entirely to our own devices. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade those long, empty, boring summer days for all the smartphones in the world.