The Textural Experience Of Life Before The Internet. What Was It Like?

Life before the internet: what was it like? I'm often surprised by how difficult it is for me to recall the textural experience.

I don't mean the small things we used to do, like reading paper maps and calling people. Those things I remember pretty well. I have a vivid memory of driving with my then-boyfriend from Buffalo, where his family was, to New Orleans, where I was in graduate school -- a nineteen-hour drive. We went to AAA and got a TripTik -- a series of paper maps showing the entire route. We didn't have credit cards, so his mom made us a hotel reservation for a place about half way through and we paid in cash when we got there.

What I have trouble remembering is more just what it was like just being at home and not having anything to do and not having the internet for on-demand connection and entertainment. Specific memories tell me this was a big part of life, but it's hard for me to recollect what it felt like. Obviously it sometimes felt boring or dull, but of course it didn't feel strange or surprisingly dull, because it was totally normal.

I remember one evening being home alone before dinner in the 90s and feeling totally like "uhh, now what"?  I had probably just finished rereading all the Jane Austen books or something, and didn't have another novel I was into, and I had probably exhausted the interesting news in the newspapers -- which I typically bought two of everyday (one NYT and one local wherever I was). Then I realized I hadn't read that week's New Yorker, which was sitting on a table. And I was like "Oh my god, The New Yorker! Thank god for The New Yorker."

Obviously it's impossible to recreate or recapture the experience, because if we try to life disconnected from the internet now, that is life disconnected from the internet, which bears no relation to life in a world where the internet just never existed.

It's easy to fall into subtraction: to try to picture what it's like by taking what it's like now, and taking things away. No social media, no email, no watching and downloading content because you feel like it. But subtraction just leaves things out, it doesn't tell you what it was like. What was it like to live without the itchy feeling that you could be -- or should be -- checking what is going on on the internet? That things are happening there, even if you're not engaging it?

I'd especially like to know what it was like to feel the mild boredom of having "nothing to do" for a while. What was it like to feel that kind of mild boredom, but to be so accustomed to it that it felt like regular life rather than an aberration?  

I'm especially interested in that because even though I complained quite a bit about boredom in my younger days, I wish I could recapture this feeling, because I feel like my whole motivational set-up was different. My internal bar for an activity being "engaging" or "interesting" seemed so much lower. Reading books that were pretty good but maybe not very stimulating, listening to people talk about slightly dull subjects, writing a letter to a friend -- I did those things all the time, easily, and it was good to do those things.

For me, there is no way to regain that textural experience, because even if I wanted to cut myself off from the internet -- which I don't -- staying away from the internet, and thinking about that choice, and thinking about what is going on there would still use up half my mental energy.

Maybe some of you remember the textural experience of life before the internet better than I do. Maybe some of you are too young to have experienced life before the internet. If you're too young to have experienced it, all I can say is that if you picture being at home now but with your router destroyed and your phone disconnected -- that is really not what it was like. I can't really remember what it was like, just that it wasn't like that.