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Episode 4: The Last Time We Asked for Directions
6 Plays7 days ago
We are the last generation to remember when knowing where you were was a skill you developed, not a service you subscribed to. This week: the death of spatial memory, the humiliation of asking strangers for help, and why getting lost might be the last truly rebellious act. Plus: a confessional about deleting maps for a week and finding something unexpected. Wanderlust. Anxiety. The open road. Welcome to Xennialist.
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Transcript
A Journey into the Unknown
00:00:39
Speaker
I was 22 years old, driving from Chicago to Denver, and I got lost in Nebraska. Not my phone died lost, not no signal lost.
00:00:53
Speaker
I mean willfully, structurally, just beautifully lost. I had a paper map, a real one, the kind that folds wrong and never goes back the way it came.
00:01:06
Speaker
And I decided to take a road that wasn't on it. Just to see. Just because i could. Just because there was a moment, a split second, where I thought, what if I don't follow the route?
00:01:24
Speaker
I drove for three hours on dirt roads through cornfields that looked identical. I had no idea where I was. No one knew where I was.
00:01:35
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My phone was a flip phone with no GPS, no maps, no internet. Just a device for calling people, which I couldn't do because I didn't know where to tell them to find me.
00:01:49
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And I was not scared. I was alive.
00:01:55
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I was paying attention to the world in a way I never had before. The slant of the sun. The direction of the wind.
00:02:07
Speaker
The way the gravel sounded different under my tires when I was on a real road versus a farm access path. I was using parts of my brain that had been dormant my entire life.
Impact of GPS on Our Minds
00:02:35
Speaker
I'm Jeff Pavlisko, and this is Xenialist. Episode 4. The last time we asked for directions. The death of spatial memory, GPS as cognitive outsourcing, and getting lost might be the last truly rebellious act.
00:02:55
Speaker
I want to talk about what it meant to know where you were. Not to be told where you were by satellite. To know. to hold a mental model of your city, your state, your world, built from experience and error and the specific embodied act of moving through space.
00:03:18
Speaker
When I was a kid, my dad had a Thomas Guide in the car, a massive spiral-bound atlas of the entire Chicago metro area. Page after page of grids and street names I noted with his own handwritten notes, shortcuts to avoid during rush hour.
00:03:38
Speaker
Good diner. He knew that book the way a sailor knows the stars. He could flip to any page without looking. He could trace a route with his finger while driving, glancing down, glancing up, never losing his place.
00:03:55
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And I learned from him. Not just the routes, but the method. How to orient yourself by landmarks. How to estimate distance by time.
00:04:07
Speaker
How to read the sun's position and know, roughly, which direction was north. These were not party tricks. These were survival skills.
00:04:19
Speaker
These were the cognitive architecture of a person who existed in physical space. Now, I don't know my own city. I mean, I know it in fragments.
00:04:32
Speaker
The route from my apartment to the grocery store. The route to my friend's house. The route to the airport. These are not maps of my head. These are scripts.
00:04:46
Speaker
Turn-by-turn instructions given to me by an algorithm. Followed without comprehension. Forgetting the moment I arrive. There have been studies, actual scientific studies, about what GPS does to the brain.
00:05:04
Speaker
And the findings are not subtle.
00:05:08
Speaker
When we use turn-by-turn navigation, our hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory and navigation, essentially goes to sleep. We stop forming cognitive maps.
00:05:23
Speaker
We stop encoding our environment. We become, cognitively, passengers in our own lives. And Xennials, we are the generation that experienced this transaction in real time.
00:05:40
Speaker
We remember when knowing where you were was a skill you developed, a muscle you exercised. And we remember when that skill became obsolete, when the muscle atrophied,
00:05:54
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when we voluntarily outsource one of the most fundamental human capacities to device that fits in our pocket.
The Decline of Navigation Skills
00:06:01
Speaker
I want to read you something. This is from a study published in 2017 in the journal Nature Communications.
00:06:10
Speaker
Researchers put people in a virtual maze. One group used GPS-style turn-by-turn directions. The other group had to figure it out themselves. Then, they scanned their brains.
00:06:23
Speaker
The results show participants who navigated without GPS showed increased activity in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, regions associated with spatial memory and decision-making.
00:06:36
Speaker
Participants who used GPS showed no significant activity in these regions. These brains were effectively inactive during navigation.
00:06:47
Speaker
One of the most cognitive demanding tasks our species has ever faced finding our way through an unknown environment, and our brains were just inactive. Because we had delegated the work to a machine.
00:07:02
Speaker
And here's where the study didn't measure. What we lose when we stop paying attention to space. When the world becomes a blur of turns and exits. When we no longer notice the buildings, the landscapes, the subtle changes in light and sound that tell us where we are.
00:07:22
Speaker
when we trade presents for efficiency. I am not anti-technology. I use GPS. I use it constantly.
00:07:33
Speaker
I would be lost. Literally. Cognitively. Essentially lost without it. But I am aware, in a way that I think only Xennials can be, of what I've given up.
00:07:47
Speaker
of the cognitive map I used to carry, now replaced by a glowing rectangle that tells me where to turn. Let's talk about asking for directions. Because this was not just a practical act.
00:08:01
Speaker
It was a social act. It required vulnerability. It required admitting to a stranger, in public no less, that you did not know something.
00:08:14
Speaker
That you were lost. That you needed help. I was 16, driving my mom's minivan, trying to find a friend's house in a neighborhood I'd never been to.
00:08:27
Speaker
No GPS, no smartphone. Just an address scribbled on a piece of paper and a general sense that I was getting warmer. When I pulled over at a gas station, an old man was sitting on the porch drinking a coffee.
00:08:44
Speaker
I walked up to him. Me. A teenager. Invading the space of an adult stranger. And I said, excuse me. I'm lost.
00:08:56
Speaker
Can you help me find Oak Street? And he didn't just give me directions. He performed them. He used his hands. He referenced landmarks.
00:09:07
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He said, you'll see a red barn on your left, then a church with a steeple that's missing its cross. He told me a story about the neighborhood, about how Oak Street used to be a dirt road, about the family that lived in the house I was looking for. He gave me context.
00:09:29
Speaker
He gave me a place.
00:09:33
Speaker
This interaction took five minutes. It was inefficient. probably unnecessary. I could have found the address faster with a map, faster still with GPS, but it was human.
00:09:49
Speaker
It was a moment of connection between two people who shared a physical space, who existed in the same world, who helped each other because that's just what you did.
00:10:02
Speaker
Now, I have not asked a stranger for directions in 15 years. I have not needed to. And i have not wanted to Because the idea of interrupting a stranger, of admitting my disorientation, of engaging in the messy, inefficient, vulnerable act of human wayfinding, it feels alien.
00:10:28
Speaker
It feels like a skill I've lost.
00:10:32
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along with the cognitive maps and the spatial memory and the ability to exist in the world without a device, mediating my experience.
Interchangeable Places & Lost Experience
00:10:42
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And here's the raw truth. GPS didn't just kill our sense of direction. It killed our sense of place. When you navigate by algorithm, every place is interchangeable.
00:10:57
Speaker
The turn is the same. The voice is the same. The experience is the same. Whether you're in Nebraska or Naples, the world becomes a series of instructions, not a landscape to be inhibited.
00:11:19
Speaker
Time for the Zenial Confessional. This one is about a place, about getting lost, and what we found when we didn't know where we were.
00:11:31
Speaker
And it reads, I deleted my Maps app for a week, just to see. I got lost constantly. I was late to everything.
00:11:43
Speaker
I ended up in neighborhoods I didn't know existed, on streets with names I'd never heard. i ate at a diner because I was lost and hungry, and it was the only thing open.
00:11:56
Speaker
I talked to a bartender for an hour because I needed directions and he wouldn't let me leave without a drink. I was the most alive I'd felt in years. And i reinstalled the app on day eight because I have a job, because I have responsibilities, because the world doesn't reward getting lost anymore.
00:12:19
Speaker
But I think about that diner. i think about that bartender. I think about what I found when I wasn't looking for anything. Thank you listener for submitting that.
00:12:32
Speaker
I think about that too. The things we find when we're not looking. The people we meet when we're lost. The parts of ourselves that wake up when we stop following the route and start following.
00:12:47
Speaker
Wherever this is. curiosity, instinct, the ancient pre-digital part of the brain that knows how to navigate without a satellite.
00:12:59
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And I want to say something that might sound contradictory. GPS is not evil. GPS is a tool. It has saved lives. It has made travel accessible to people who would otherwise be excluded.
00:13:16
Speaker
It has connected us in ways that really matter. But tools shape us, they change us, they become invisible.
00:13:28
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And in becoming invisible, they become inevitable.
00:13:34
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We don't choose to use GPS anymore. We default to it.
00:13:40
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We forget that there was ever another way. And in that forgetting, we lose something. Not just a skill, but a way of being.
00:13:53
Speaker
a way of existing in the world that was slower, messier, more vulnerable, and I think more alive.
Digital vs. Physical Relationships
00:14:05
Speaker
I want to end with a question, and it's the question I'm carrying into the next episode.
00:14:13
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Who do you still know, and who do you only follow? I mean this literally and figuratively. Who are the people in your life that you could find without a phone?
00:14:28
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That you could describe to a stranger if you needed directions to their house? That you have spoken to face to face in the last month or the last year?
00:14:40
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And who are the people you only know through screens? Through posts and stories and the carefully curated fragments they choose to share? Are they friends?
00:14:52
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Are they acquaintances? Are they something else? A new category of relationship that didn't exist before, that we don't have a language for, that feels like connection, but functions like consumption.
00:15:11
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i think Xennials are uniquely positioned to feel this distinction because we remember when friendships was geographic. when your friends were the people you could walk to, when knowing someone meant sharing physical space, not just a digital feed, when staying in touch required effort and tension, the specific act of picking up a phone or writing a letter or showing up at someone's door.
00:15:42
Speaker
And we also know the digital version, the ease of it. The way social media lets us maintain the appearance of connection without the substance. The way we can keep up with 50 people without actually talking to any of them.
00:15:58
Speaker
The way friendship has become a passive activity. Something we consume rather than cultivate. I don't know what to do with this knowledge. I don't know how to go back.
00:16:11
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Or if going back is even possible. Or if it's
Embracing Vulnerability in Exploration
00:16:14
Speaker
desirable. don't
00:16:16
Speaker
But I know that getting lost taught me something about being found, about the value of vulnerability, of asking for help, of allowing myself to be dependent on other humans.
00:16:34
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And I think, at least I hope, that the same is true of friendship. that there is a value in the messy, inefficient, vulnerable act of showing up, of being present, of not just following someone's life, but actively participating in it.
00:16:57
Speaker
That's episode four of Xennialist, the last time we asked for directions. If you have a confession about getting lost, about finding your way,
00:17:09
Speaker
about the places you discovered when you weren't looking. Send it in. I'll read it. I'll sit with it. I won't GPS optimize it.
00:17:22
Speaker
Next episode, the friend group chat autopsy. We're talking about friendship in the age of constant connection, the evolution of social maintenance, and why the group chat is both a lifeline and a prison.
00:17:38
Speaker
Until then, Turn off your maps. Take a wrong turn. Get a little lost. The world is bigger than the route.
00:17:51
Speaker
You are here.