GPS messes with our ability to navigate
August 19th, 2024
I love maps and orienteering. The location services on my phone don't work properly because of the custom rom I installed, so I'm forced to figure out my location on the map manually, by the things i see around, since GPS is not an option. That way every time I'm going somewhere new turns into a fun game.
When I spent a year with dumbphones, every time i needed to go to an unfamiliar place, I'd look up the route beforehand and draw a little map on a piece of paper, highlight the landmarks and write notes. It was SO fun. I'm not doing some boring chores that involve moving around the city anymore, I'm a fucking pirate with an old treasure map instead.
I think, dependence on GPS messes with our ability to navigate for ourselves. If you are blindly following the directions given by your navigational app, you aren't actually navigating, you aren't forming a 3D map of the area in your head and you aren't linking the pieces together. Navigation is a very useful skill that anyone can learn and improve through work, and when you are simply following the instructions, that skill atrophies.
But why is this skill still useful now? It was crucial back in the day, because you must know where to find water, what areas are dangerous, where you already gathered, how to come back home from afar and so on. But now, when all of us have smartphones with GPS and you can ask somebody for directions in the city, it's impossible to get lost, so navigation skills should become practically obsolete.
Why do I think that it's still a very good thing to know? Well, it's most likely a core skill for humans that contributed to our success as a species, and therefore it should be really beneficial for the brain to employ it, especially for spatial thinking. Creating mental maps in your head is also really fun and as a result, your phone's battery will drain slower...
I'm certainly not saying we should abolish GPS and never use it again, but sometimes it can be really fun and beneficial to abandon it for a while and to exercise your brain to figure out the route without an app telling you where to go turn by turn. You'd also remember more from your trips and walks, if you relied less on automated directions.
Me and my classmates came up with a No Maps Challenge and sometimes we are doing it when hanging out. It's simple — you go somewhere and use no maps. The first time we did it was on, like, second day of university and knowing each other. We decided to walk to our homes instead of taking bus, and use no maps at all, only our feel of direction. For reference, the bus ride to our homes is around 1 hour long. It took us 5 hours before we found ourselves in a completely unfamiliar place and gave up. We looked at maps and it turned out that we followed a correct path for the most part, but then we messed up at one turn and went in the opposite direction.
Despite the failure, it was a great day of pure fun, exploration and becoming friends. The only food we had during that trip was one tomato we stole from someone's garden that we split between three people and a bottle of kvas. We also stole an onion from the same garden and put it in the toilet tank at our uni the next day, so that every time someone flushes, the water has a strong onion smell.
I also really love figuring out the location of places from photos. One instance of this I'm most proud of: someone told me there's a train graveyard in the city — a place where broken and abandoned trains are left. But there was no info of its location online, since urban explorers almost always conceal the coordinates of places in order to keep out retarded kids coming to their hidden places, destroying everything what's left there, pilfering all of the remaining stuff, spraying the walls with graffiti and littering on every single surface.
I couldn't find the location online, so I opened satellite images and after some searching found something looking very much like a train graveyard. I went to the place and it was indeed the correct one.
The other time someone told me about underground tunnels, and, again, no coordinates online. Me and my classmate guesstimated the approximate search radius based on the bits of info and photos we had and started our field operation. We searched everywhere in that area for two full days and in the late evening of the second day we found it. The entrance to the tunnels.
It's probably quite obvious that the concept of maps makes me hard wildly excited. Other fun things I do with maps: I mark on them all of the interesting places I come across; I draw from memory the routes I've taken. There's software to automatically record your route in the background, but I'm doing it to retrospectively reconstruct my route, sort of relive the trip in my head while remembering all of the turns, unify it in my head, understand the area better and build a good mental map. It also makes me pay more attention to the surrounding stuff while I'm outside, since it'll help me to remember where I went.
I also got a courier job at a delivery service for the summer break. I deliver groceries on bike. The pay isn't great, but I'm basically paid for doing things I'd do for free, and my motivation is mostly bike, quest system and novelty, rather than money. And maps. A really big part of the job is navigating, and I really enjoy it. I only use my phone about two times during one delivery — first, to check where I need to go, and second — already at the client's house, to look up the apartment number.
Fuck you GPS! I love knowing my city really well and every time a passer-by asks me for directions my mood lifts up by 250%, because I can answer immediately, without looking at maps, even if I don't know the area well.