Sometimes You Have To Shut It All Down To Start It All Up Again

Against GPS.

Hi friends.

In Orlando we ate late-ish and then had coffees with our dessert and they were still on west coast time and I was on holiday so we ended up chatting till nearly midnight.

Later I wrote down:

Do you have friends you want to visit just so you can eat a meal with them? Do you have friends you want to visit just so you can take a walk with them? Do you have friends you want to visit just so you can look at the stacks of books in their living room and talk about what they’ve been reading lately or plan on reading next?

But during the conversation things got really interesting when we were talking about Sarah Thankam Mathews's¹ invigorating piece on Luddites in N+1. We kept talking about wanting to put our phone down. Wanting to find our own way again. It has to start somewhere. We have to start somewhere. I also got into a longer story about last-minute edits to my book which I will write you about in full someday.

Right now, though, I can tell you a small part of it that ties into our conversation about Luddites.

Which was that when I first got to Asheville I drove around with the GPS voice on my car for a week or so and after a while I began to realize I wasn’t learning anything about how to get around the city. I wasn’t learning what direction I was going in, I wasn’t learning any landmarks. I wasn’t even developing any feelings about the landscape. I was always stuck somewhere between eyes on the map and this computer voice in my head.

Finally I shut that bitch off and instantly I became better situated in the city. And I felt on my own again, independent, thoughtful, alert, because I was not being spoken to every day by a computer voice. I felt distinctly better.

I don’t want to say the GPS is our enemy, but I don’t know if it’s our friend, either.