1. Ride bikes around, see if friends where home and go build jump ramps or build forts in a vacant feild.
2. Make a fishing rod from a stick and see who could catch a fish first in the river with it.
3. Play cards, betting some embarrassing or physically difficult thing you had to do if you lost.
4. Ride/walk into town and check out the shops, pawn shops and local ice cream parlor. There was always some trinket shop too that had neat stuff no matter where we lived that I’d go routinely explore. Pawn shops where also a favorite, got my first guitar from there and outfitted my first car’s stereo with speakers from one.
5. Build or dismantle something to do whatever I wanted it to do. One summer I got tired of being on bunk beds with my brother and the trailer park we lived in had a bunch of left over 2x4 wood in a random feild. So I built him and me two separate twin beds. Then took apart the old metal bunk bed and built a treehouse with it sometime later.
6. Head over to a friends and play video games or sit and watch a movie together.
As an adult, I wondered a lot. Would go on hikes or explore new parts of the city I was in. Internet at this time was around, but not as apart of daily life as it is now.
I’d wonder and stop in at a bar, call up a friend and go do something. Often it was us all doing things we needed while also just hanging out together.
Come to think of it, socially speaking, things where much, much more social back then. Additionally, there was always a presence of whimsy or seeking to be inventive. With either your time or with you time+ whatever resource you had. I.e. a whole weekend on paydays would involve bars and buying things to mess with.
It was just a constant effort to invent something to fill your spare time with. Very often involving one or two buddies hanging around too.
- Phone a friend and chat
- Phone a friend and go for coffee, a walk, a drive, or just hang out at theirs or mine
- Phone a couple friends (one at a time) and arrange to (depending on time of day and schedule) go clubbing together, pubbing, to an event, etc
- Go alone for a walk (usually along the ocean), or into town, or to one of my 'third places' to hopefully run into friends
- Watch TV. This left one with a sad, unsatisfying feeling if a session went on too long: the TV studios geared their writing to the LCD. This is absolutely why MTV was so hugely popular before the net.
- Go shopping, or window-shopping (famously, to some people, 'the mall' was a 'third place'). Ideally, some non-chain store (eg: a specialty book store with foreign/obscure books and magazines)
- Play/practise a musical instrument
- Skateboard (something I have not done for aeons now)
- Rent, or rewatch, a VHS tape/DVD of a movie
- Read a book, a magazine, or a newspaper
- Start some mini-project (anything from laundry, to creative writing, to tending to a business card collection, to making a tee shirt)
- Write letters to friends who had moved away (long distance phone calls were expensive)
- Relax with a cup of tea, smoke cigarettes and listen to music. Often while doing this I would re-read my favorite books; easy to browse ones, like art books, old photos etc.
- Oh, and program my computer! Just... making programs without a whole lot of collaborative features, obviously.
This is the sort of question a young person asks, with the greatest of respect, so I recommend spending time with older generations and learn from mentors who will gladly guide and advice based on their decades of life and experience "living" an actual "live".
I think there is more depth to your question than one might think. What does it mean to be bored? How far into the past are you interested to, cavemen or industrial revolution? What about contemporary people (not just in africa) who don't have internet access?
"... to the detriment of innovation, boredom itself has been has been radically transformed by the advent of digital media. Today the slightest hint of restlessness or pocket of spare time tends to have us reaching for our smartphones -- and yet the possiblity of real boredom, and the urgent desire to escape it, has historically acted as an important cultural catalyst. For punks in the 1970s, the "dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes spent waiting in queues or for public transport" were viewed as a "challenge, an injunction and an opportunity". Nowadays, "in the intensive 24/7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus". In compulsively engaging with frivolous online content that we recognize -- even celebrate -- as tedious, we sorely limit ourselves. We have arrived at a situation in which "no one is bored, everything is boring" ..."
From Hauntings by Tom Graham, a review of K-PUNK by Mark Fisher, in TLS, May 24, 2019, p. 32