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The Dawn of the Reliance Economy
Your attention was never the endgame
“Once you hit the first intersection in town, make a right onto Main Street. Go past the fire station and over the railroad tracks. Make your second right after the tracks. If you see a large metal building with a truck parked in overgrown grass, turn around; you’ve gone too far…”
These are part of the directions to the house I grew up in. For decades, these directions, in one form or another, would be dictated to people planning to visit for the first time. Once I could drive, I would reference equivalent narratives, hastily scribbled down on paper, as I made my way to somewhere new.
This was a deeply inefficient process. It required an upfront conversation to get the directions, followed by significant effort and consternation to decipher them en route. If you were lucky enough to have a “navigator” in the passenger seat next to you, that opened up a whole separate level of coordination. “Wait, was that the big tree with the ‘Y’ in it? Wasn’t that our turn? You were supposed to be watching for the ‘Y’ tree!”
But while inefficient, this process represented something profoundly valuable: awareness and connection.
In order to rattle off a narrative like that, tethered to a landline phone in your kitchen, you had to maintain a detailed map of the area in your head. You and your visitor had to have a shared awareness and contextual understanding of major landmarks and geography, allowing you to shortcut details: “Can you get yourself to Interstate 70? Yes? Great, get to I-70 and head west…”
If you regularly use navigation, think about your own mental map of your town or city. How far out can you go before your map starts to fade?
To follow the directions, you had to remain acutely aware of your surroundings throughout the journey. Getting lost and turned around was a common occurrence. But every wrong turn and missed landmark represented new learning and discovery, a chance to expand your own internal map and build your resilience as you were able to troubleshoot and get back on track.
