In the ’90s, This One Thing Made Nights In Feel More Special. We Can Get It Back.

Downtime We can get it back. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Dan Kois? Aug 31, 20262:00 PM Illustration by Tolga Akdoğan Welcome to Party Like It’s 1996, a six-week time-travel challenge to help you rediscover the lost art of hanging out. This is Challenge No. 4, but you can sign up here to get this series in your inbox from the beginning. Hola amigos, Been a long time since I rapped at ya. Welcome back to Party Like It’s 1996, your journey to pre-millennium times, when the khakis were baggy, the computers were buggy, and a street cellphone call was the lowest phone call you could make. I want you to pat yourself on the back for completing last week’s challenge. You did it! You hung out with a friend without plans or agenda, just some professional-caliber nothing-doing. I want you to pat yourself on the back for completing last week’s challenge. You did it! You hung out with a friend without plans or agenda, just some professional-caliber nothing-doing. This was definitely a week designed for the homebodies, who wrote with enthusiasm about their nights with friends working on coloring books, listening to the Dance Dance Revolution version of “La Bamba,” or watching Nightmare on Elm Street on a VCR. (That last was an amazing detail, Jessie G.) I particularly appreciated an email from reader Neha, who talked about how she’s really put in effort over the years to make her home a place where people feel comfortable just stopping by to hang out. Her goal has always been to encourage her neighbors, friends, and kids to view hanging out as an acceptable—nay, a superior—way to spend their time. It was a lot of work, she pointed out, always being the one putting herself out there. But, she wrote, the work paid off: Now when my teens walk home from school, they do so with groups of friends who often just stop by and stay for a while to hang out. Kids drop in here and at each other’s homes. They bring new friends. They wander. It is possible, Neha is saying, to build a different kind of life for you and your community! It takes real work, but that work can be so worth it. So, great job hanging out with pals. Your reward is that this week you’re having a quiet night in. Yes, just you, or you and your roommate, or you and your partner, or you and your kids. (We hadn’t thought of polycules in 1996, but that’s fine, too.) The defining characteristic of 20th-century popular culture was its relative dearth of choices. Even back then, we were feeling the dissatisfaction of—in the words of 1990s poet laureate Bruce Springsteen—57 channels and nothin’ on. Yet compare that thin gruel to the contemporary smorgasbord of streaming networks, Spotify, YouTube, e-books—not to mention the metastatic internet, ever growing, ever malicious. Back in 1996, the consumption of culture at home was restricted to what we could physically put our hands on or what was being broadcast at that precise moment. Napster, which made the universe of recorded music available to anyone who could afford a DSL internet connection, didn’t launch until 1999. YouTube wasn’t founded until 2005! We can discuss the benefits and the bummers of this revolution all day long, but it’s indisputable that the glut of cultural products available at the tap of a finger can be enervating. We scroll through our many options, reading blurb after blurb, until we throw up our hands and select something, anything. Or, pre-exhausted at the very idea of deciding what to watch, what to look at, what to listen to, we let the algorithm do it for us. Our choices are thoughtless, perhaps because these days, it hurts to think. Here’s your mission, if you choose to accept it. CHALLENGE NO. 4: STAYING IN If you have live TV, see what’s on right now on the four broadcast networks, TNT, ESPN, or HBO. Pick one and stick with it. That’s your network for the night.If you own DVDs, choose a disc and watch it. (The ordeal of picking a DVD can be an entertaining 15-minute activity all on its own.)If you have access only to streaming services, click on the service that most accurately reflects your personality and then watch whatever the first option is on the home screen—whether you’ve seen it before or not.Pop some popcorn.If you need a break from the tube, make something! Do a craft, write a poem, draw a picture, bake a dessert. Why am I limiting your options so harshly? In the 1990s, the options were meager, and so our choices felt correspondingly crucial, because they were expressions of our taste. Everyone had taste, and taste was individual, a crucial part of one’s identity. You listened to a song not because a recommendation engine found the waveform that most closely approximated the waveforms of your previous 1,000 songs. You listened to a song because you plucked that CD from your CD rack, popped the disc into your boom box, and pressed Play. Or you turned on your car, chose your radio station, and let your favorite DJ take you away. Were you a “Must See TV” person or a CBS drama person? An art-house movie person or a blockbuster person? A college radio station person or a classic rock station person? An Entertainment Weekly person or an Us Weekly person? So let your night in be a testament to your own taste. Make something with your own hands that reflects the person you are. And choose a particular book, a particular movie, a particular TV channel. All of these are corporate widgets of one sort or another, of course, but they were all created or chosen by a person, thinking about what other people might want to experience—in some way related, that is, to the cookies you baked or the poem you wrote. They are the products of a human sensibility, and thus worthy of your taste. Oh, and while I’ve said that this project is not anti-phone—tonight your phone should not be in your hand. In 1996, there was no second screening. [Seinfeld voice] Second screening?! I don’t want a second screening!! That’s what your doctor orders when your first screening shows an anomaly!!! [End Seinfeld voice] It’s not that the cultural products of the 1990s were better than the cultural products of today. (Quick reminder that the No. 1 single for all of 1996 was “The Macarena.”) But come hell or high water, our attention was directed at whatever we were watching. ER might have been a little clunkier and a little preachier than The Pitt, but by God, we were living and dying for those brief looks between George Clooney and Julianna Margulies, because our eyes never left the screen. Try it! You might be surprised how much more you like whatever TV show you watch (or hate it, if it’s a Netflix show where the characters have to explain the plot three or four times). Next week, we’ll begin to put this all together. Clear your calendar! You’re about to have a 1996 adventure. But first, write to me the well-rested morning after your evening in! That email address is 1996@slate.com. I want to know what thoughtful choices you made about what to watch, listen to, and read. Did you stumble across The Shawshank Redemption on TNT and then have to watch it until the end? Now, that’s serendipity! Catch ya on the flip side, Dan Movies Relationships TV Friendship Party Like It’s 1996