Posted by karakoram 5 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet people did it for 500 years.
Makes you wonder what millions of your predecessors could do that you can't.
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.
Millions of your predecessors died in ways easily preventable today.
"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." - Ovid
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new 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
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 can proudly say that I have not lead us astray.
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.