In the ’90s, It Was Still an Essential Way to Connect With People. We’ve Lost It Entirely. We Shouldn’t Have.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Welcome to Party Like It’s 1996 , a six-week time-travel challenge to help you rediscover the lost art of hanging out. Sign up here to get this series in your inbox.

Last week I asked you to spend a night out on the town that really focused on being where you were rather than where else you could be , and embracing serendipity and even mistakes. Well, mission accomplished: Y’all had some great nights! Some of you went out alone and struck up conversations with folks at the bar or at the open mic. Some of you ended up watching the Anne Hathaway dinosaur movie . Jessie G. went thrift shopping for cassette tapes and listened to them with friends on the beach. Kassia G. brought a friend from out of town out to a bar “and introduced her to everyone I saw that night.” Lucy B. brought a book with her, and discovered that reading a 17th-century philosopher in a coffee shop will definitely get people talking to you.

And reader Alee Q. sent me a lovely story about taking her mom to her favorite bar in Carbondale, Illinois, and running into characters galore from life and work. “In Carbondale, we often still do things the old-fashioned way,” she wrote, and I do think there is something about medium-sized college towns (Carbondale is the home of Southern Illinois University) that fosters serendipitous encounters—even if you’re not a college student, the infrastructure and spirit of the town seem built for the analog night out.

Me? On Friday afternoon Kevin texted that he was going to the beer garden, so I met him and Ashley there, and I taught them The Game (not that The Game ), and then I suggested we go to the movies. These days, when you call a theater on the telephone to ask them if they’re showing a particular film, you’ll hear a really long pause, and then some rustling sounds, and then the sound of an employee asking her manager something, and then “I don’t think so.” But eventually we found a theater playing Tony , a terrific movie that itself contains a lot of 1979-era big nights out, most of which end very badly.

We certainly did not party the way 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain did. We didn’t start a single fistfight, or land in a heap on a single sidewalk after being tossed out of a bar. But we did make decisions about our evening on the fly, and we did avoid using our phones to find out what everyone else was doing elsewhere in our town (or on the whole internet). We never once ran out of things to talk about! It was a good night out.

Imagine, for a moment, that you received this missive not in your email inbox but in an envelope in your mailbox. When was the last time you received mail from someone you love? Until recently, for me, it was somewhere around 2004. But a few years ago, frustrated with the way I was passively experiencing my faraway friends’ lives—reading status updates, looking at photos, actually interacting with them once per year—I vowed to do things differently.

Look, group chats are obviously one of the great inventions of the 21st century.