The driver in the lane next to me, mid-highway, suddenly jammed into my lane without warning. No signal, no gradual merge, just a sharp cut that forced me to brake hard. I saw her face as she passed: eyes flicking between the road and the glowing rectangle mounted on her dash. Apple CarPlay, full screen, the blue route line telling her she needed to be over here, now, to catch the exit she hadn't been thinking about until the voice told her to.

She didn't know where she was going. The screen knew. And when the screen updated, she moved, and the rest of us adjusted or didn't.

This is driving now.

The Outsourcing of Orientation

I'm not innocent in this. I've lived in eight cities since 2018: St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Antonio, Spokane, Atlanta, a stint in Ramstein, Nashville, and now Washington DC. That's a lot of new roads, new grids, new highway systems. And in every single one, I've leaned on GPS from day one. Plug in the address, follow the line, arrive. I never had to learn the city because the city was always being narrated to me in real time.

The result is that I've lived in places for months, sometimes years, without ever building a complete mental map. I couldn't draw the major arteries on a napkin for most of them. I know the routes I've driven dozens of times only as a sequence of turns, not as a spatial relationship. If the GPS died mid-trip, I'd be guessing.

This used to be different. People used to learn cities the way they learned anything else: through repetition, error, and correction. You missed a turn, you figured out how to recover, and the next time you didn't miss it. The map in your head got sharper with every trip. Driving was a skill that included knowing where you were, not just how to operate the vehicle.

GPS replaced that process with delegation. You don't need to know where you are if something else knows for you. You don't need to anticipate the exit if a voice will tell you when it's coming. You don't need to understand the city's geometry if the blue line will guide you through it. The cognitive work of navigation has been offloaded entirely, and what's left is just execution: turn when told, merge when told, arrive.

The problem is that execution without understanding produces terrible drivers.

The Symptoms Are Everywhere

Watch traffic for ten minutes and you'll see it. The last-second lane dive. The sudden brake before a turn that wasn't anticipated. The car drifting slowly in the left lane, driver squinting at the screen, trying to figure out if this is the exit or the next one. The hesitation at a green light while someone processes the next instruction. The erratic speed of a driver who doesn't know how far away their turn is and can't judge it without the ETA box.

These aren't aggressive drivers or distracted texters. These are people who genuinely don't know where they're going, moment to moment, and are relying on a system that updates faster than they can react. When the GPS recalculates, they recalculate, and the recalculation happens in real time, in traffic, at speed. The rest of us experience it as chaos.

It's not just the navigation. The whole infotainment system contributes. Modern cars have become rolling media centers: massive touchscreens, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, Spotify, podcasts, messages, notifications. The moment you get in the car, you plug in, and suddenly your phone's entire ecosystem is mirrored on the dash. Music and maps become inseparable. You're not just navigating; you're managing a media experience while navigating, while driving, while theoretically paying attention to the road.

The interface is designed to be seamless, and that's exactly the problem. Because it's seamless, you use it constantly. Because you use it constantly, the map is always on, even for trips you could do in your sleep. And because the map is always on, you never build the internal map that would let you do it in your sleep. The convenience prevents the learning.

Learned Helplessness at 70 Miles Per Hour

There's a term in psychology called learned helplessness: when repeated exposure to uncontrollable situations leads people to stop trying to control anything, even when control becomes possible. GPS driving is a mild version of this. You stop trying to learn the route because the route is always provided. You stop thinking ahead because the system thinks ahead for you. You stop reading the road because the screen reads it for you.

And then, when something goes wrong, when the GPS lags or the route changes or the exit comes faster than expected, you have no fallback. You haven't been paying attention to the signs. You don't know what's north. You don't know that this highway connects to that one. You're just following the line, and when the line betrays you, you panic, and the panic manifests as a sudden lane change that nearly clips the car next to you.

The driver who cut me off wasn't malicious. She was helpless. The screen told her to move, and she had no other information to work with, no internal sense of where she was or what was coming. She was a passenger in her own vehicle, executing commands from a system that doesn't know or care about the cars around her.

The City as Abstraction

I think about what I've lost by never learning these cities properly. Not just the practical knowledge, the shortcuts and the backroads and the sense of how neighborhoods connect, but something harder to name. A feeling of being placed. Of knowing where you are in relation to everything else. Of having a city exist in your head as a coherent space rather than a series of disconnected destinations.

When you navigate by GPS, every trip is point-to-point. You don't experience the city as a whole; you experience it as a sequence of instructions. The space between your origin and destination is just noise, something to get through, not something to understand. You could drive the same route a hundred times and still not know what's one block off the path, because you've never had a reason to look.

This is a small loss, maybe. A nostalgic complaint. But I notice it when I visit cities I learned before GPS, places I drove in my teens and early twenties when getting lost was still possible and recovery was still necessary. I know those cities in a way I don't know the ones I've lived in since. They exist in my head as shapes, as relationships, as places I could navigate without help. The newer cities are just pins on a map, connected by blue lines I couldn't reproduce from memory.

A Modest Suggestion

I'm not going to tell you to throw away your GPS. I'm not going to do that either. The technology is too useful, especially in unfamiliar places, especially when time matters, especially when the alternative is genuinely getting lost in a city you don't know.

But I've started, occasionally, turning it off for trips I take often. The drive to the grocery store. The route to work. The way to a friend's house I've visited a dozen times. I let myself not know for a few minutes, let myself read the signs and make the turns from memory, let myself build the map that the screen has been building for me.

It's uncomfortable at first. There's a low-grade anxiety that comes from not having the voice, not having the line, not having the ETA counting down in the corner. But the anxiety fades, and what replaces it is something like orientation. A sense of where I am. A sense of where I'm going. A sense that the city is a place I'm moving through, not a puzzle being solved for me in real time.

The driver who cut me off will probably do it again. So will I, probably, on some day when I'm not paying attention and the screen tells me to move and I move without thinking. We're all in this together, a highway full of people who don't know where they're going, trusting the machines to figure it out.

But every now and then, it's worth remembering that we used to know. And we could again, if we wanted to. If we turned it off long enough to learn.