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I also dont miss the days without GPS bike computers, having to navigate route with printed out google maps sheets just to realize the resolution was not high enough for my route and I had to stop at every 3rd intersection to confirm I'm still on the right track.
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Back in 2014, I returned to San Diego for a high school reunion. I did not yet have any mobile device, but my parents loaned me a car and their feature phone for my use while I was home.

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.

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If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.

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.

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You're losing out on the "inconvenient" getting lost experiences, which it appears you are focusing on, as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences.

Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new experiences.

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> as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost 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

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