People Will Always Get Lost
On the sense-of-direction scale, mine is immeasurably bad. I simply cannot find my way. The minute I try to make sense of a map, an unfathomable emotional process takes over. I can get within two missteps of where I need to be, but in the time it takes from when I realize I’m lost to when I get to where I’m going—even if it’s only five minutes—I panic. Cheeks burn. Heart speeds up. Ears get hot. Mind turns to water.
Having a smartphone has only given me the illusion of control. If you can’t read a map, you can’t read a map, especially if the map is as seriously impaired as Google Maps. The blue dot might be showing your location 20 meters away from where you’re standing. The affective experience of being lost quickly inflates from a local problem of orientation to a general feeling of ontological failure. I feel worse than incompetent: I feel illiterate.
It doesn’t matter what kind of devices you carry in your pocket: When you’re out in the city, you’re on our own.
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal,” the early 20th-century critic Walter Benjamin wrote in his memoir of his childhood in Berlin. “It requires ignorance—nothing more.” Then he continued:
But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—this calls for quite a different
