A Summer Spent Slowly, the Way the Nineties Taught Us

There has been a quiet experiment running underneath this whole summer, one that started almost by accident and has since become something closer to a practice. It began with a single afternoon of leaving the phone in another room, and it has grown into an entire season lived at a different pace, the kind of pace that belonged to childhoods spent outside until the porch light came on, to mixtapes recorded off the radio one song at a time, to a world that had not yet learned to move as fast as it does now.

The research, if it can even be called that, has mostly taken the shape of curiosity rather than study. What did a summer evening feel like before everyone carried the entire internet in their pocket? What filled the hours that are now filled with scrolling? The answers keep circling back to the same things: handwriting, patience, boredom that eventually turns into imagination, and a kind of presence that only shows up when nothing is competing for attention.

On Tape, On Purpose

The VHS tapes were meant to be a joke at first, a nostalgic prop for a photo, and then the joke became genuinely lovely. There is something unmatched about the soft static hum before a film begins, the slight wobble in the picture, the commitment required to actually sit and watch rather than half-watch while doing three other things. It turns out a worn tape asks for a kind of attention that a streaming queue never will.

Paper Everything, Almost

Writing everything by hand has become the backbone of the season: the journal, the to-do lists, even letters that will likely never be sent. There is a clarity that comes from a pen moving across paper that a keyboard has never quite offered, a slowness that lets a thought finish itself before the next one arrives. The phone, when it is picked up at all, feels almost foreign now, a tool rather than a tether.

A few small rules have made the whole thing easier to hold onto. The planner is paper, the grocery list is paper, the notes scribbled mid-thought are paper, all of it filled out by hand rather than typed into an app that will forget it by tomorrow. The one exception is the drive itself, since a paper map has its charm but a wrong turn in an unfamiliar town has its limits.

Through the Lens, Not the Screen

The cameras have come out of storage too, the real ones with real film and real weight in the hand, and there is a particular joy in composing a photograph slowly instead of tapping a screen a dozen times and choosing the best of twelve nearly identical shots. A photo taken this way asks to be considered before it is taken, which changes the whole experience of taking it.

Waiting, Watching, Welcoming Boredom

Boredom has become something to welcome rather than solve. An empty hour used to feel like a problem to fix with a phone; now it feels like a gift, the kind that eventually turns into an idea or a nap or simply the pleasure of watching the light move across a room.

Television has returned to being an appointment rather than a bottomless queue—one show, one set time, the anticipation itself part of the fun. Nothing is on demand anymore, not really, not in the way it used to be, and there is something almost freeing about waiting for a thing rather than summoning it instantly.

The waiting turns out to be part of the pleasure, a kind of anticipation that a world of endless immediate options had quietly trained us out of. And somewhere in the middle of most days there is a phone hour, an actual hour where the phone goes into another room entirely and the only calls being made are the kind that require a full conversation rather than a text.

Sun-Catching Over Scrolling

The best hours, though, may be the ones spent sun-catching, stretched out somewhere warm with nothing but a book or a wandering mind, choosing the sun over the scroll every single time.

What has surprised most is not the nostalgia itself but the peace that has followed it. Days feel longer in the best possible way, unhurried and full without being frantic. There is room to notice things again: the particular gold of early evening light, the sound of a screen door, the pleasure of a task done slowly and completely rather than quickly and half-finished.

The Honest Part

None of this is a claim to some fully unplugged life, and it would not be honest to pretend otherwise. Running a business and a nonprofit still means real hours spent on the phone and the laptop most days, emails answered, plans made, the actual work of building something done in the way that work requires now.

But the boundary has become clearer for it, a firm line drawn around what the day needs and everything after it. Once that work is done, the rest of the day gets to belong entirely to the slower version of things, peaceful and unhurried and genuinely disconnected rather than only appearing that way.

This is not a rejection of the present so much as a borrowing from the past, a reminder that a slower life was always available, tucked somewhere underneath all the noise.

Some things, it turns out, were better on tape.