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

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.

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 20 th -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.