When I go to a new city, I find a landmark than take the train/bus/subway towards it but not to it. I get off ~ 3-5 miles away from it, then I try to find on my own navigating the streets in the general direction of it. Yes, it takes a an hour or two to get there, but I get to see things at random which otherwise I would miss.
I have seen people with phones in their hands asking for directions and not knowing how to tell Google Maps where they want to go.
It’s interesting to think of the way experiences go away, in this context. You can get lost if you want nowadays, but it is pretty rare to get lost if you don’t want to.
Now you get lost because you intentionally didn’t check the map or because you intentionally didn’t ask for directions, and you have the fallback GPS. In the past, a well-planned trip included landmarks or other opportunities to recover from getting lost, and might not have gotten too far from the familiar. And you got lost in a world where most gas stations had maps and asking for/giving directions was totally common.
IDK. Getting lost in the past was 99% annoying anyway so I’m not going to write anything nostalgic about the lost magic of it, or whatever. It’s funny to think that it can’t really be replicated, though.
Orienteering is a good skill to have. My wife and one of my best friends could both get lost trying to get out of a cardboard box.
With that said, in the days before GPS, I recall wandering off my planned route for a bit in a new to me city, crossed the wrong street, and ended up in the poorest neighborhood and gang controlled territory. Nothing came of it, other than a lesson learned to be a little more careful about planning potential deviations rather than impromptu ones.
Going into the donut store and having to pass money under bullet proof glass and getting the donut through a revolving bullet proof door was certainly an interesting experience, though not one I'd care to repeat.
Pre-(consumer) GPS, I definitely got turned around even in cities I knew reasonably well that aren't on a grid system in parts. It can be bad enough today in some sections of busy cities where you need to constantly shift lanes etc. and be at least moderately aggressive but trying to drive with a map open on your lap at night could be a bit of a nightmare--and not especially safe. It probably took me years before I had a passable sense of the geography of Boston.
> Pre-(consumer) GPS, I definitely got turned around even in cities I knew reasonably well that aren't on a grid system in parts. It can be bad enough today in some sections of busy cities where you need to constantly shift lanes etc. and be at least moderately aggressive but trying to drive with a map open on your lap at night could be a bit of a nightmare--and not especially safe.
As I was reading your comment I was imagining how hard it would be to do in Boston where even using a GPS gives me borderline paranoia then I finished reading your comment.. Yeah that's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.
I have a friend I sometimes take to the Longwood Medical Center area (which I'm not very familiar with). She's actually quite a careful conservative driver. But we go there and it's get in the left lane, now get in the right lane, don't leave so much space in front, follow where that car is going, etc. Cambridge I actually know pretty well but I try to avoid Boston.
Navigate and safely drive at the same time maybe? Which people were presumably not doing 500 years ago. When walking, you're in a lot better position to stop and get your bearings. You're probably also not walking as much to totally unfamiliar areas even if I did get myself a bit lost a few times when I was first in the area.
The "Derive"[1] app from french collective "Hérétique"[2] his really great to help you wander while still going on your way. I use it a lot when discovering a new city by foot...
It's fascinating to see how reliant our world is on GPS services (GNSS more precisely, not only location, but especially time) and how we still get even more reliant every day while at the same time we can see how fragile all of this is in the conflict zones of the world.
Maybe there is room for a stalker like lost art in navigation in places where it all breaks down but I doubt it.
The future I see is more one of autonomous navigation systems. Ones that pick up locations cues wherever they are and build a local map that helps you or your vehicle to find your way.
In the 1979 Tarkovski film the "Stalker" is a person who knows the lost art of safely navigating a particularly dangerous area. People pay the Stalker to guide them.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure why I should feel nostalgic about inconvenience. Getting lost is a major inconvenience, it creates anxiety, wastes time, and all around just sucks.
GPS greatly reduces all of those things at the expense of... I'm not sure what honestly. The article was short on that part - or at least, to me, the benefits felt like inconveniences reframed as excitement and entertainment. I'll pass on this and most of the 'I miss the good ol days when life was harder ' genre.
I don't miss the days of stopping at a gas station for directions. I don't miss taking the slower route because I didn't have traffic updates redirecting me. I don't miss inconvenience for its own sake.
To each their own, but I really don't get this inconvenience nostalgia period we find ourselves in.
If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.
There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.
I also dont miss the days without GPS bike computers, having to navigate route with printed out google maps sheets just to realize the resolution was not high enough for my route and I had to stop at every 3rd intersection to confirm I'm still on the right track.
Back in 2014, I returned to San Diego for a high school reunion. I did not yet have any mobile device, but my parents loaned me a car and their feature phone for my use while I was home.
Now a few of my friends arranged an informal meetup which I jokingly called “The Honors Reunion” and they chose a brew pub on Coronado Island. I know many San Diego neighborhoods like the back of my hand, but Coronado was a place where I only drove to the beach, not needing any map or navigation, because it is hard to miss the Pacific Ocean segment between a Naval Air Station and the Hotel Del.
Anyways, I asked Mapquest how to find this brew pub, and I made a printout. This should have sufficed: Coronado is really, really small.
But the pin on the map led me to a darkened, mostly residential side street. I parked, walked around, scratched my head, and concluded that the map was wrong.
So rather than try asking for directions or calling my parents, I am a man after all: I drove up and down every street, crisscrossing the business district, basically brute-forcing the map until I finally stumbled on the location itself.
My friends were all there, happy to see me again, and we had a great chat before the big reunion activities began.
Arriving back home, I managed to piece together what happened, and apparently I had just made an extra misclick on the map surface just as I printed it out, sending the pin into no-man's-land.
That is probably the last time I got thoroughly and accidentally lost.
You're losing out on the "inconvenient" getting lost experiences, which it appears you are focusing on, as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences.
Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new experiences.
> as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences
I'm glad other people have had such lovely "getting lost" experiences but I never have so I don't have any kind of good feelings for it. Getting lost has always been inconvenient for me
One of my best experiences in Prague back around 2010 was when I had no Google Maps, tried navigating with a hotel pamphlet map, and promptly lost my way towards the student culture house I was trying to find.
Ended up asking some locals where I was, and amused they assured me I was way outside the map and had gone east instead of north. I did not want to backtrack so I asked if there was any nice places to get a beer nearby and they pointed me towards a beer garden. Those were some of the nicest Pilsner Urquells and Staropramens I had during my visit. No tourists to be seen, and good vibes all around.
Nowadays I mostly navigate with GPS and rarely just happen on random places like that. I guess we lose some of the discovery when you always know where you are going.
I was hiking one time and did have a guidebook. Things didn't look quite right but I did convince myself I was on the right track. (This was pre-GPS.) Eventually I ended up in someone's backyard. Fortunately there was (obviously) a road there and I figured out I had gone the wrong direction from the trailhead. (I think it was the Appalachian Trail.)
I volunteer at the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) and we recently did some navigation training. We have to be prepared for a situation when we don't have access to GNSS. I recently moved to the place where I currently live and I don't have a car. Navigating someone to places you have never seen before by map was a really fun challenge.
In India, using Google Maps is far better, but it does have a few instances of failures (some that have been disastrous). When lost, asking people for directions has its own failure modes, due to people sometimes describing directions verbally in one way but pointing in another (opposite) direction with their hands (this is an amusing observation in India). The people who use Apple Maps (maybe a handful of them in the country) are cursed to get lost. That service is so hopeless in finding places that it may list something in another country or state.
I had the experience in india of, I believe, asking for directions, and the person didn't want to lose face by saying "I don't know and can't help you", so they just sent me in a random direction
It's hilarious how many people avoid lower Wacker drive in Chicago because they're so dependent on gps.
I don't have a car so I don't drive often, but I can't stand gps directions when I do, constantly changing the route and micro optimizing. I just look at the map and try to remember it. (Admittedly, having a map in a car is useful, even if I don't like the directions).
A related atrophied skill is the inability for many people to find a place to stop for lunch on the route, since they only understand turn by then directions, not the map.
I make a point of driving on Lower Wacker because it's fun, but for someone who doesn't drive downtown a lot, it's both kind of confusing and also a bit nerve-wracking; I wouldn't ever expect, like, my mom to drive it.
To some extent this is what "killed" geocaching too. It's still a good niche hobby but up until to 2013 or so it was more fun when not everyone had a GPS in their pocket. Of course you can still play without a GPS but there was a kind of sense of community where everyone tried to help each other. Now you just look at your phone and follow a path
The good old days. I used to live in a cul-de-sac and out-of-town people often wanted to get to a nearby street. The nearby entrance to that one was blocked for traffic reasons.
Tell people they have to turn right 6 times and drive 4 kilometers and they won't believe you.
I just had a much smaller version of this experience yesterday in SF -- the goal was to climb the rocky peak at Corona Heights and then visit the Randall Museum, and as I was coming down Roosevelt not 500 feet from that first stop (around a corner to my right), I realize that I absolutely recognize this neighborhood and in fact I realize that I have been to the Randall before -- or at least I've been in its backyard -- about two years back on a hike up some stairs from the States Street playground with my daughter. The choice of the park was random and then she had wanted to know what was up the stairs so we climbed them and we ended up in the play yard behind there.
But, based on the landmarks I can see and my vague memory that the Randall is "up above us" I turn left on Masonic away from Corona Heights Park, misidentifying the neighboring Buena Vista Park as Corona Heights and orbiting it looking for the museum until we see a prominent staircase with a sign saying "Buena Vista Park" and I realize the extent of my eff-up. I turn away and switch my car's screen from Media to Map -- it doesn't have Corona Heights marked in green as a park but it's reasonably clear where it has to be -- and then unexpectedly I realize I'm in the Castro, randomly?
Punching the thing into GPS takes a second and then the Randall is in fact, in a cul-de-sac which is not what I was expecting -- actually I miss the turn down States Street where the playground was -- and so even though I'm "right next" to the Randall, GPS is like "okay, let's go up the big hill all the way back to where you started turning onto Roosevelt, and we'll try ALL OF THIS over again."
My wife and daughter, needless to say, did not view this as a successful exploration even though I was quite happy with the fact that I'd indeed recognized the neighborhood (and the playground and the museum without seeing either of them).
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
I have been living without a cell/smart phone for about six years now. I am a runner and I'd like to run at every city I visit. I have done many early morning runs in a strange city without a map or a phone. I lost sometimes but always found my way back.
One thing I notice is that I pay more attention to the road names whenever going somewhere without a map or GPS. I try to memorize road names instead of "turn left" or "turn right" notifications in digital maps these days.
Pre-gps, my wife and I used to head to a destination (local trips to pick up something, often a good distance from home) and on the return home pick random right and left turns. Eventually we would wind up headed back home, but not after exploring the countryside. It was always a nice way to spend an afternoon.
> “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.
Articles like this one annoy me so much, where is clear the author started with a premise and backfilled the "evidence". The New Yorker would never publish this kind of speculative innuendo if the article was for example about vaccine hesitancy, so it's frustrating to see that stanard relaxed for other topics.
Way back when, I did take some orienteering although I never did it seriously especially because, in the Northeast, it's mostly trails. But I haven't taken any orienteering for years and years.
The park orienteering course at the end reminds me of a similar development in game design: Even before most people had GPS phones in real life, many video games already had a form of virtual GPS: A map with a marker of where the player is in the virtual world.
Only much later did various games start to abandon that marker (possibly even a map in general), because it made navigation too easy: it disincentivized exploration, orientation, things like figuring out vague verbal directions, and path finding in general.
I find that it's difficult to thread the needle of navigating on my own with also not spending forever in traffic or in train delays. It's disheartening when I do know how to get somewhere, but I land in a +1 hour traffic jam because I chose to not look at GPS.
Maybe I need an app that just yells at you when you take a super-wrong turn, or if you're about to be in a massive amount traffic?
I still often check the map, albeit now on Google Maps, before I go somewhere I don't know, whether by car or on foot.
I find it provides much better and needed awareness of my surroundings. It sometimes also helps falling for sat-nav bad choices. On foot/by public transport I often don't even need to check my phone and can just walk looking around (I know, who does that?!)
I've been visiting a particular hospital while perfectly healthy, and said hospital is undergoing a lot of construction. Even in normal conditions, a large medical center is challenging to navigate, but with the construction surprises, even more so. Google Maps doesn't have sufficient internal information to help (although I noticed that Maps does seem to know where all the sections are inside the local Best Buy?) I did obtain and scan a comprehensive map of the campus, but sometimes it is not sufficiently interactive to find where I am, or how to get somewhere.
So I spend a lot of time walking and trying to follow the many directional signs, which can be helpful. Hospital navigation is a lot of walking. It is unsurprising that many will punt to a wheelchair with assistant. Anyway, it is often the case that I encounter a VIP administrator or high official (evident from their high heels, elegant dress, and lofty demeanor) and they easily notice I'm very lost, and they offer to help and give me directions. The first time, I accepted because I was just trying to get outside without encountering the E.R. again. But the second time I looked the lady in the eye and I said "no thank you! I rather enjoy getting lost in here!" and she smiled and said she feels the same way.
We were on our way to Annual Training for the National Guard on a charter bus. I was seated close to the front and could see where we were heading, and knew that we were leaving the small town where the garrison was, getting on the interstate, and heading to the post across the state. I saw the sign on the side of the road pointing straight ahead to the interstate entrance/exit. The bus driver's GPS said "Turn right," and he turned right without thought, right into a neighborhood with narrow streets and deep ditches on either side. He couldn't navigate the turns in the bus to get us back out, and eventually had to back out the way he came. Thanks, Tom Tom.
Amusingly both this and the opposite happen semi-frequently to us. Sometimes the maps apps have the location where people most often get dropped off and that’s superior because the signs are mechanically true but also useless (next 3 exits to the XYZ museum, but the first two lead to the one that’s closed most days which isn’t mentioned on the exit sign).
You can still get lost today if you want to.
When I go to a new city, I find a landmark than take the train/bus/subway towards it but not to it. I get off ~ 3-5 miles away from it, then I try to find on my own navigating the streets in the general direction of it. Yes, it takes a an hour or two to get there, but I get to see things at random which otherwise I would miss.
I have seen people with phones in their hands asking for directions and not knowing how to tell Google Maps where they want to go.
It’s interesting to think of the way experiences go away, in this context. You can get lost if you want nowadays, but it is pretty rare to get lost if you don’t want to.
Now you get lost because you intentionally didn’t check the map or because you intentionally didn’t ask for directions, and you have the fallback GPS. In the past, a well-planned trip included landmarks or other opportunities to recover from getting lost, and might not have gotten too far from the familiar. And you got lost in a world where most gas stations had maps and asking for/giving directions was totally common.
IDK. Getting lost in the past was 99% annoying anyway so I’m not going to write anything nostalgic about the lost magic of it, or whatever. It’s funny to think that it can’t really be replicated, though.
Or even less structured, just taking the first random bus you come across and see where you end up.
Orienteering is a good skill to have. My wife and one of my best friends could both get lost trying to get out of a cardboard box.
With that said, in the days before GPS, I recall wandering off my planned route for a bit in a new to me city, crossed the wrong street, and ended up in the poorest neighborhood and gang controlled territory. Nothing came of it, other than a lesson learned to be a little more careful about planning potential deviations rather than impromptu ones.
Going into the donut store and having to pass money under bullet proof glass and getting the donut through a revolving bullet proof door was certainly an interesting experience, though not one I'd care to repeat.
Pre-(consumer) GPS, I definitely got turned around even in cities I knew reasonably well that aren't on a grid system in parts. It can be bad enough today in some sections of busy cities where you need to constantly shift lanes etc. and be at least moderately aggressive but trying to drive with a map open on your lap at night could be a bit of a nightmare--and not especially safe. It probably took me years before I had a passable sense of the geography of Boston.
> Pre-(consumer) GPS, I definitely got turned around even in cities I knew reasonably well that aren't on a grid system in parts. It can be bad enough today in some sections of busy cities where you need to constantly shift lanes etc. and be at least moderately aggressive but trying to drive with a map open on your lap at night could be a bit of a nightmare--and not especially safe.
As I was reading your comment I was imagining how hard it would be to do in Boston where even using a GPS gives me borderline paranoia then I finished reading your comment.. Yeah that's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.
I have a friend I sometimes take to the Longwood Medical Center area (which I'm not very familiar with). She's actually quite a careful conservative driver. But we go there and it's get in the left lane, now get in the right lane, don't leave so much space in front, follow where that car is going, etc. Cambridge I actually know pretty well but I try to avoid Boston.
I was imagining how hard it would be to do in Boston
And yet people did it for 500 years.
Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.
Not necessarily.
For example, landmark-based navigation is good in rural areas but not generally in cities (of today).
I believe there are studies on this, in fact.
Navigate and safely drive at the same time maybe? Which people were presumably not doing 500 years ago. When walking, you're in a lot better position to stop and get your bearings. You're probably also not walking as much to totally unfamiliar areas even if I did get myself a bit lost a few times when I was first in the area.
> Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.
Millions of your predecessors died in ways easily preventable today.
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." - Ovid
"Most European cities" entered the room ;)
Yeah, but I'm usually not driving around European cities so it's less of an issue.
Flashbacks of driving around Los Angeles with a Thomas Guide and a new bride…
The "Derive"[1] app from french collective "Hérétique"[2] his really great to help you wander while still going on your way. I use it a lot when discovering a new city by foot...
[1] https://derive.today/
[2] https://heretique.fr/en
It's fascinating to see how reliant our world is on GPS services (GNSS more precisely, not only location, but especially time) and how we still get even more reliant every day while at the same time we can see how fragile all of this is in the conflict zones of the world.
Maybe there is room for a stalker like lost art in navigation in places where it all breaks down but I doubt it.
The future I see is more one of autonomous navigation systems. Ones that pick up locations cues wherever they are and build a local map that helps you or your vehicle to find your way.
Can you describe what you mean by “stalker like lost art in navigation places”? This sounds cool!
In the 1979 Tarkovski film the "Stalker" is a person who knows the lost art of safely navigating a particularly dangerous area. People pay the Stalker to guide them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
I'll be honest, I'm not sure why I should feel nostalgic about inconvenience. Getting lost is a major inconvenience, it creates anxiety, wastes time, and all around just sucks.
GPS greatly reduces all of those things at the expense of... I'm not sure what honestly. The article was short on that part - or at least, to me, the benefits felt like inconveniences reframed as excitement and entertainment. I'll pass on this and most of the 'I miss the good ol days when life was harder ' genre.
I don't miss the days of stopping at a gas station for directions. I don't miss taking the slower route because I didn't have traffic updates redirecting me. I don't miss inconvenience for its own sake.
To each their own, but I really don't get this inconvenience nostalgia period we find ourselves in.
If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.
There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.
I also dont miss the days without GPS bike computers, having to navigate route with printed out google maps sheets just to realize the resolution was not high enough for my route and I had to stop at every 3rd intersection to confirm I'm still on the right track.
Back in 2014, I returned to San Diego for a high school reunion. I did not yet have any mobile device, but my parents loaned me a car and their feature phone for my use while I was home.
Now a few of my friends arranged an informal meetup which I jokingly called “The Honors Reunion” and they chose a brew pub on Coronado Island. I know many San Diego neighborhoods like the back of my hand, but Coronado was a place where I only drove to the beach, not needing any map or navigation, because it is hard to miss the Pacific Ocean segment between a Naval Air Station and the Hotel Del.
Anyways, I asked Mapquest how to find this brew pub, and I made a printout. This should have sufficed: Coronado is really, really small.
But the pin on the map led me to a darkened, mostly residential side street. I parked, walked around, scratched my head, and concluded that the map was wrong.
So rather than try asking for directions or calling my parents, I am a man after all: I drove up and down every street, crisscrossing the business district, basically brute-forcing the map until I finally stumbled on the location itself.
My friends were all there, happy to see me again, and we had a great chat before the big reunion activities began.
Arriving back home, I managed to piece together what happened, and apparently I had just made an extra misclick on the map surface just as I printed it out, sending the pin into no-man's-land.
That is probably the last time I got thoroughly and accidentally lost.
You're losing out on the "inconvenient" getting lost experiences, which it appears you are focusing on, as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences.
Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new experiences.
> as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences
I'm glad other people have had such lovely "getting lost" experiences but I never have so I don't have any kind of good feelings for it. Getting lost has always been inconvenient for me
One of my best experiences in Prague back around 2010 was when I had no Google Maps, tried navigating with a hotel pamphlet map, and promptly lost my way towards the student culture house I was trying to find.
Ended up asking some locals where I was, and amused they assured me I was way outside the map and had gone east instead of north. I did not want to backtrack so I asked if there was any nice places to get a beer nearby and they pointed me towards a beer garden. Those were some of the nicest Pilsner Urquells and Staropramens I had during my visit. No tourists to be seen, and good vibes all around.
Nowadays I mostly navigate with GPS and rarely just happen on random places like that. I guess we lose some of the discovery when you always know where you are going.
I was hiking one time and did have a guidebook. Things didn't look quite right but I did convince myself I was on the right track. (This was pre-GPS.) Eventually I ended up in someone's backyard. Fortunately there was (obviously) a road there and I figured out I had gone the wrong direction from the trailhead. (I think it was the Appalachian Trail.)
I volunteer at the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) and we recently did some navigation training. We have to be prepared for a situation when we don't have access to GNSS. I recently moved to the place where I currently live and I don't have a car. Navigating someone to places you have never seen before by map was a really fun challenge.
I can proudly say that I have not lead us astray.
In India, using Google Maps is far better, but it does have a few instances of failures (some that have been disastrous). When lost, asking people for directions has its own failure modes, due to people sometimes describing directions verbally in one way but pointing in another (opposite) direction with their hands (this is an amusing observation in India). The people who use Apple Maps (maybe a handful of them in the country) are cursed to get lost. That service is so hopeless in finding places that it may list something in another country or state.
I had the experience in india of, I believe, asking for directions, and the person didn't want to lose face by saying "I don't know and can't help you", so they just sent me in a random direction
It's hilarious how many people avoid lower Wacker drive in Chicago because they're so dependent on gps.
I don't have a car so I don't drive often, but I can't stand gps directions when I do, constantly changing the route and micro optimizing. I just look at the map and try to remember it. (Admittedly, having a map in a car is useful, even if I don't like the directions).
A related atrophied skill is the inability for many people to find a place to stop for lunch on the route, since they only understand turn by then directions, not the map.
I make a point of driving on Lower Wacker because it's fun, but for someone who doesn't drive downtown a lot, it's both kind of confusing and also a bit nerve-wracking; I wouldn't ever expect, like, my mom to drive it.
That atrophied skill might be untrainable now that most map apps have some ability to search for food nearby and add a destination to the route.
To some extent this is what "killed" geocaching too. It's still a good niche hobby but up until to 2013 or so it was more fun when not everyone had a GPS in their pocket. Of course you can still play without a GPS but there was a kind of sense of community where everyone tried to help each other. Now you just look at your phone and follow a path
The good old days. I used to live in a cul-de-sac and out-of-town people often wanted to get to a nearby street. The nearby entrance to that one was blocked for traffic reasons.
Tell people they have to turn right 6 times and drive 4 kilometers and they won't believe you.
I just had a much smaller version of this experience yesterday in SF -- the goal was to climb the rocky peak at Corona Heights and then visit the Randall Museum, and as I was coming down Roosevelt not 500 feet from that first stop (around a corner to my right), I realize that I absolutely recognize this neighborhood and in fact I realize that I have been to the Randall before -- or at least I've been in its backyard -- about two years back on a hike up some stairs from the States Street playground with my daughter. The choice of the park was random and then she had wanted to know what was up the stairs so we climbed them and we ended up in the play yard behind there.
But, based on the landmarks I can see and my vague memory that the Randall is "up above us" I turn left on Masonic away from Corona Heights Park, misidentifying the neighboring Buena Vista Park as Corona Heights and orbiting it looking for the museum until we see a prominent staircase with a sign saying "Buena Vista Park" and I realize the extent of my eff-up. I turn away and switch my car's screen from Media to Map -- it doesn't have Corona Heights marked in green as a park but it's reasonably clear where it has to be -- and then unexpectedly I realize I'm in the Castro, randomly?
Punching the thing into GPS takes a second and then the Randall is in fact, in a cul-de-sac which is not what I was expecting -- actually I miss the turn down States Street where the playground was -- and so even though I'm "right next" to the Randall, GPS is like "okay, let's go up the big hill all the way back to where you started turning onto Roosevelt, and we'll try ALL OF THIS over again."
My wife and daughter, needless to say, did not view this as a successful exploration even though I was quite happy with the fact that I'd indeed recognized the neighborhood (and the playground and the museum without seeing either of them).
It's possible to get "lost" even with modern GPS.
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
I have been living without a cell/smart phone for about six years now. I am a runner and I'd like to run at every city I visit. I have done many early morning runs in a strange city without a map or a phone. I lost sometimes but always found my way back.
One thing I notice is that I pay more attention to the road names whenever going somewhere without a map or GPS. I try to memorize road names instead of "turn left" or "turn right" notifications in digital maps these days.
Pre-gps, my wife and I used to head to a destination (local trips to pick up something, often a good distance from home) and on the return home pick random right and left turns. Eventually we would wind up headed back home, but not after exploring the countryside. It was always a nice way to spend an afternoon.
https://archive.md/lqZnn
> “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.
Articles like this one annoy me so much, where is clear the author started with a premise and backfilled the "evidence". The New Yorker would never publish this kind of speculative innuendo if the article was for example about vaccine hesitancy, so it's frustrating to see that stanard relaxed for other topics.
I'm pretty sure there is sufficient general research which says that if you don't train a skill, it gets weaker.
Way back when, I did take some orienteering although I never did it seriously especially because, in the Northeast, it's mostly trails. But I haven't taken any orienteering for years and years.
The park orienteering course at the end reminds me of a similar development in game design: Even before most people had GPS phones in real life, many video games already had a form of virtual GPS: A map with a marker of where the player is in the virtual world.
Only much later did various games start to abandon that marker (possibly even a map in general), because it made navigation too easy: it disincentivized exploration, orientation, things like figuring out vague verbal directions, and path finding in general.
Related: I highly recommend "The Natural Navigator" by Tristan Gooley[0] as a means of training your brain to orient itself.
[0] https://www.naturalnavigator.com/
I find that it's difficult to thread the needle of navigating on my own with also not spending forever in traffic or in train delays. It's disheartening when I do know how to get somewhere, but I land in a +1 hour traffic jam because I chose to not look at GPS.
Maybe I need an app that just yells at you when you take a super-wrong turn, or if you're about to be in a massive amount traffic?
I still often check the map, albeit now on Google Maps, before I go somewhere I don't know, whether by car or on foot.
I find it provides much better and needed awareness of my surroundings. It sometimes also helps falling for sat-nav bad choices. On foot/by public transport I often don't even need to check my phone and can just walk looking around (I know, who does that?!)
In the past, people were also heavily relying on road signage or stopping and asking locals, especially when not carrying a map.
My car always had a US Atlas and at least one state map in it at all times.
I feel like most people had an atlas or a paper map in their car most of the time. Though it is possible that I was more prepared than most.
I've been visiting a particular hospital while perfectly healthy, and said hospital is undergoing a lot of construction. Even in normal conditions, a large medical center is challenging to navigate, but with the construction surprises, even more so. Google Maps doesn't have sufficient internal information to help (although I noticed that Maps does seem to know where all the sections are inside the local Best Buy?) I did obtain and scan a comprehensive map of the campus, but sometimes it is not sufficiently interactive to find where I am, or how to get somewhere.
So I spend a lot of time walking and trying to follow the many directional signs, which can be helpful. Hospital navigation is a lot of walking. It is unsurprising that many will punt to a wheelchair with assistant. Anyway, it is often the case that I encounter a VIP administrator or high official (evident from their high heels, elegant dress, and lofty demeanor) and they easily notice I'm very lost, and they offer to help and give me directions. The first time, I accepted because I was just trying to get outside without encountering the E.R. again. But the second time I looked the lady in the eye and I said "no thank you! I rather enjoy getting lost in here!" and she smiled and said she feels the same way.
We were on our way to Annual Training for the National Guard on a charter bus. I was seated close to the front and could see where we were heading, and knew that we were leaving the small town where the garrison was, getting on the interstate, and heading to the post across the state. I saw the sign on the side of the road pointing straight ahead to the interstate entrance/exit. The bus driver's GPS said "Turn right," and he turned right without thought, right into a neighborhood with narrow streets and deep ditches on either side. He couldn't navigate the turns in the bus to get us back out, and eventually had to back out the way he came. Thanks, Tom Tom.
Amusingly both this and the opposite happen semi-frequently to us. Sometimes the maps apps have the location where people most often get dropped off and that’s superior because the signs are mechanically true but also useless (next 3 exits to the XYZ museum, but the first two lead to the one that’s closed most days which isn’t mentioned on the exit sign).