You used to be able to not know where you were. Not dangerously — not survival-level lost — but genuinely turned around in a city, uncertain which direction you’d come from, having to read the street or ask someone or just pick a direction and commit to it and see what happened. That was an experience. It had texture and mild stakes and required something of you. Now you take your phone out and a blue dot tells you exactly where you are and a line tells you exactly where to go and you follow the line and arrive and the whole middle part, the part where you were somewhere without knowing where, just didn’t happen.
What gets lost when you can’t get lost is a certain relationship with place. To really know a city you have to have been confused by it, have to have ended up somewhere you weren’t trying to go and had to find your way back. The wrong turns are how you learn the shape of a place — where things actually are relative to each other, what’s around the corner from what, the geography as lived experience rather than abstracted map. The phone gives you the map. It does not give you the experience of moving through the territory and slowly understanding it.
There’s also something that happens in the not-knowing that doesn’t happen when you know. When you’re lost your attention sharpens. You’re actually looking at the street — reading signs, noticing landmarks, paying attention to the angle of the light, the direction of traffic, the kind of neighborhood you seem to be in. The lostness makes you present in a way that following a blue dot never does. You walk the same number of blocks but you see completely different things. The phone makes you efficient and absent. Being lost made you slow and awake.
Some of my best travel memories are from being wrong about where I was going. The street that didn’t exist, the turn I took too early, the afternoon I spent in a neighborhood I would never have chosen and ended up in exactly the right place by accident. None of that happens anymore because I don’t let it happen. I open the app before I’ve even given myself a chance to try. The uncertainty lasts about four seconds before I close it with information, which is fast enough that I never find out what I would have done with it.
I left my phone in my bag for an hour in a city last year and just walked. Got turned around twice. Found a street market I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Ate something I couldn’t identify from a woman who seemed amused that I was there. Ended up approximately where I meant to be, later than planned, with a better afternoon than the planned one would have been. The blue dot would have been faster. I’m glad I didn’t use it. I’m going to use it tomorrow. But for one afternoon I was lost in the old way, the good way, the way that requires you to be somewhere instead of just passing through it.