The Joy of Getting Lost and Finding Your Way

Sure, the journey is the destination and all that. But to me, it’s more about the gamble.

May 18, 2020

I’m not so unusual: I have Google calendar to remind me where I’m supposed to be at any given hour of any given day, Google maps to tell me how to get there, and Google notifications to pester me, so I don’t show up late.

So this may or may not be surprising: My secret, solitary joy is getting lost.

The two are actually related. At rare moments when I have nothing to do — no remote work meetings, no shelter-in-place grocery foraging, no distance-learning lessons to impose on my children — I find that the best use of my time is to set out on a course for nowhere, with zero idea how to find it.

It was easier, prepandemic, of course, but there are still an infinite number of ways of getting lost, all equally satisfying. You can get lost on foot, on a bicycle or in a car. You can get lost in an unknown neighborhood in your own city, on a country back road (taking sensible precautions, of course, for personal safety). Maybe someday soon, or soon-ish, we once again might be able to get lost in the narrow back alleys of some far-flung city.

But coronavirus or no, the same principles apply: To get properly lost, there must be no phones, no technology. There is no GPS to bail you out. It’s you versus the maze that is life. It’s up to you to find your way out.

It used to be easy to get lost, in the days of landlines and paper maps. We stomped the pavement or pounded our steering wheels because being lost equaled powerlessness.

Now, we have too much power. Thanks to our smartphones, we each live in our own private surveillance states, mere blue dots traversing an endless onscreen map.

To elevate lost-ness to an art form, however, you need to observe the rules. For starters, the destination must be as fuzzy as the route to get there. I might park my smartphone at home and hop on my bike for Coney Island, but I am headed to Coney Island only in the sense that Coney Island is kind of this way, unless it’s more that way. The point is to end up in neighborhoods I’ve never seen, see signs in languages I do not recognize. I make no plans for when, or if, I arrive. To get lost is to stay lost, for as long as possible.

To me, this is not just an argument for digital detox, or a smartphone-phobic repackaging of the familiar idea that the journey is the destination. To me, getting lost is a form of gambling, reveling in the delicious torture of an unknown outcome.

The biggest thrills come from the biggest stakes. My personal Everest was getting lost in the vast tangle that is Tokyo several years ago. Outside the tourist centers, I found, few street signs or subway maps were in English, and asking directions is cheating. This made not for terror, but for a bracing encounter with a more real Tokyo. It was the joy of ignorance. It was the joy of discovery.

If you think about it, they are kind of the same thing.

Alex Williams is a Styles reporter who has a complicated relationship with his iPhone.

Doodles by Jason Fujikuni and Christiaan Triebert. Jason is an art director at The Times. Christiaan is a journalist on the visual investigations team at The Times.