On getting lost and being lost

This episode looks at the skills we once had to navigate our way through life, both on the physical plane as well as the intellectual plane and how we are losing those skills due to technology and how we are increasingly lost, but unaware of it.

Transcript

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Good morning. Today I want to talk about whether we are lost in our modern world, or whether we truly know where we are. And this might sound like a strange question to start todays conversation with.

But it occurred to me. We are rapidly losing the skills that we once had to find our place in life. 

So what do I mean by that. 

Well here's a simple example. It wasn't so long ago that when we were going somewhere. We would have to ask for directions from someone. To find out how to get somewhere. And once we got in the car. We would have a book book full of maps. And we would sit for a moment and we would piece together the instructions, we've been given, and we would trace out on the map, where we thought we needed to go. And once we were clear on roughly that direction, the main roads we needed to take, and so on, we would set off. Along the way we would refer to the instructions and measure progress against the map and the landmarks we were told to look out for. And occasionally we would take a wrong turning, and we would get lost. 

In fact, getting lost, was quite a common occurrence not so long ago and when we got lost, we would stop somewhere, wind down the window, and we'd ask a passer-by where we were. And they would normally ask where we were going, and we would describe our destination and if they knew they would try to give us some directions either back to the main road, or to the place we were going.

So, in that process, we were always in in a form of investigation, listening, fact finding questioning, understanding, envisioning. We had skills, skills, to ask questions, skills to take down directions, accurately, we had to remember quickly what people had said, and be able to transcribe those details accurately into a map of some description and be able to orient that map against the atlas we had. 

So when you think about it like this we employed a huge range of cognitive and interpersonal skills in just trying to do a simple thing of navigating from A to B.

So it is safe to say that we would have had quite advanced skills in an every day task like navigation. 

I mean how how do we know when we've gone too far. How do we know if we haven't gone far enough. What sort of things are we looking for. where was that big tree that was mentioned? Was it in the park, or was next to the swings. These are all forms of questioning that allowed us to position ourselves in time and space, and to understand where we were and where we're going to be. We had to be able to conjure up a mental image of what was being described and orient ourselves against what we saw around us and navigate cognitive space in 3D in order to be able to go where we wanted to go.

So why am I harking back to these skills well, it occurred to me that at any moment in time nowadays. We have absolutely no idea where we are. We're never lost anymore. We don't get lost, because we have a little mobile phone with Google Maps on it. And the phone knows where we are. And the phone tells us where to go. So we don't feel lost anymore we simply don't get lost. Unless of course we lose the phone and then we are completely lost!

But the reality is we are in fact completely lost. Because if you think about it at any moment in time we have absolutely no idea where we are. We're just simply following instructions from a screen for a little voice, a map on our screen telling us to turn left, turn right, go here, go there. We don't look around. We don't take note of our surroundings. we don't remember our surroundings, we can't remember the things we passed. We're not looking for landmarks. So in actual fact, for most of the time in a car or on foot in a city. We don’t actually have any idea where we are. All we know is that we are, where our screen tells us we are. And that's quite different. That's a very different thing altogether. Because we've lost two things. We've lost our ability to understand our surroundings, and we've lost our ability to locate ourselves, because all those skills that we used to have have map reading, asking questions, Taking down directions. Looking for landmarks. Understand where east and west and north and south is by looking up in the sky to see where the sun was and understand implicitly, whether we were facing north, south, east and west as a result, being able to orient ourselves. Those skills are going or have gone in many people these days,  and for some have never ever been learned. So if you're young enough to have been brought up with Google Maps and GPS. You probably actually have no idea how to locate yourself at all. So by definition, you're lost, completely lost. You are completely dependent on something else other than yourself. To locate you. And that's all it does. It says, On this screen, you are here. And on this screen, you want to go here. That's not location. I'm not quite sure what that is, in fact, it doesn't help you in any other way other than to tell you that you've moved from one dot on a screen to another dot on a screen.

You can't even help anyone else, so if someone stops you in the street and asks you. Oh, I heard that there was a good local restaurant, just nearby. I wonder if you could tell me where that is. You will go straight away to your screen to see if it can tell you the answer. But unfortunately, it's only telling you that you are dot. And you're going to another dot. And you've been so focused on those dots that you will have passed that restaurant, two minutes ago, and you never even noticed it. So not only can you not locate yourself but you can't help anyone else locate themselves. So in that moment, What you do is you Google the restaurant. And you go, Look, we are here at this dot, and where you want to get to is that dot. That's not very helpful either. So the person without a phone, then needs to find and look at your map, and try and learn some of those skills that we were talking about earlier. Do I take the second turning on the left. How many metres Do I go down this road before I have to turn left. What am I looking for as a sign that I'm getting close to where I need to get to. So, in a sense the other person is lost too.

So, we've lost a lot of skills in that process. 

We used to also have a set of skills around finding ourselves with regard to knowledge. Now this might sound a bit abstract, but let me take you on this journey. Before the internet - how did we get knowledge and understanding? 

Well, I'm not talking about going to school. I'm talking about how did we find a book on a subject that interested us? How did we find out about subjects and ideas that we were interested in? 

Well it was a bit like asking for directions. We would ask people whether they knew of a good book on a certain subject. But the first thing we had to do is find the people who were likely to have read such a book. So we generally asked around our friends and family “do you know anyone that knows anything about woodworking”. For example, and they might sort of say, Oh yeah, you need to talk to uncle John. Uncle John is a fabulous woodworker. So, you would find your way to Uncle John. And you ask uncle John, you know, he being interested in woodwork and all or whatever the subject you are interested in -  I wonder if you can point me in the direction of (and Notice the language:  point me in the direction.) of a good book on the subject, and he would say well you know what, I remember a really good book when I was starting out, which caught my interest, and he gives you the name of that book. 

You then go along to the local library (assuming you knew where it was), and you'd ask the librarian, you'd have a scrap of paper with it written down, a bit like the instructions or directions we were talking about earlier and you would say  “I'm looking for this book”. And if the library had it they would point you in the right direction. Again, they would give you a number and you would have to find the number of the row in the library and then find the number of the book within that row to where you would find the the book you were searching for.

You would then take this book home with you and read it.

Now, you might not be taken by that book. It might not quite be what you're after. So what you would do is you would go to the references, and you'd look for all the references in that book, and those references would be to other books that the author had referred to when he was writing his book, and you'd come away with a list of interesting looking titles, and you'd go back to library and ask if they either had them at the library or they could order them in for you.

If the books had to be brought in for you you'd go back in a week's time and  those books would be in the library, and you'd go through them and you would find a book that resonated with you that you were interested in that spoke to you and gave you the information that you were seeking. You then had a choice to either borrow that book, or you could choose to buy that book from a book shop. Now, most of us used to borrow them. So you would take it home for a couple of weeks, and you'd go through and read that book. And you would probably take notes because you knew that the book was going back to the library, so you would take notes on the aspects of that book that you were interested in, -  things that you've found out about that you wanted to keep or remember. So here, you already have a skill set being employed because the human brain learns when it takes notes and writes things down. In the very process of writing something down on paper there is a process of committing it to memory. And in order to write something down, you have to first of all, understand it. Secondly, you have to think that it's relevant or has some sort of contextual meaning to all the other knowledge that you have. And you might not just quote things you might write a note about what it means to you at the time as well. So, quite a lot is going on during this process.

And when you finished with a book you'd take it back to the library. And that would be the end. But you would be left with some conclusion some understandings, some knowledge that you'd extracted from that book. And if you really felt that that book was supremely wonderful in some way, and that you really, really couldn't do without it, then you would go along to a bookshop, with all the details and you would order yourself a copy. And that book would then sit on your shelf in your house. Now that book is a location. It's a location in knowledge and understanding. It's an ability for you to understand your place in relation to a body of knowledge and the contextual world around it. That is an incredibly important thing to be able to do.

It’s probably why when we were growing up we always thought of grown ups as being very opinionated about things and we always wondered how they could be so sure about things. If you think about it. They come from a time where knowledge was difficult to access. And you had to go on a journey. You had to employ a great number of skills, and quite a lot of effort in order to attain that knowledge. And you didn't treat that book that you got from the library as something temporary or spurious because you've invested effort in getting to that point and finding the information. You set aside time to read it and understand it, and commit it to memory because it was of value to you. Therefore, the opinions that you formed were of value to you, and you knew where those opinions came from, and you knew the journey you had undertaken in order to get to those opinions. So those opinions were valuable. They defined a viewpoint. They gave you a position in conversations and that in turn gave you a place in those conversations and that body of knowledge. They in effect formed a lactation for you - gave you a reference point. So for example when it came to a conversation about woodworking, you would know something about woodworking, and you'd have it on good authority that what you were talking about was true and correct because that someone who had written the book you had read had spent a lot of time, probably, woodworking, so the knowledge he was passing on in the book was factual and practical and something valuable and trustworthy. So in a sense  the knowledge from that book put you on  firm or solid ground metaphorically speaking.

To go back to the analogy of being dropped into a city, and wondering where you were. You would be standing there, and you would know that the petrol stations on your right, you would know the name of the junction at which you stood on that street, you would know your position in relation to the whole city. You'd know which direction you were facing, you would know where to go so if someone came along to you and said, “I'd like you to build a window frame for me. Or, could you tell me where to go to get to this part of this church or cathedral,”  you would know all the steps required in order to give that person the direction they needed to get there. So in society you would become known as someone who knew something about woodworking, and people would be pointed in your direction. The same way as you had once been pointed in the direction of Uncle John, in the first place.

So in a sense, just through investigation. And those skills of finding knowledge you gained a place in society. You created a location for yourself. You had  become someone that someone else could come to for advice on a certain subject. 

Now this brings us on to another subject. So, it used to be that you found your career. Again, listen to the word, finding your career. These words are all about searching, Locating, finding, and it's what we do as humans, we search and we locate. It's a core skill of ours. So how did we find that career, or the job that we wanted to do. Well, generally speaking what we did was we talked to people. And we found out about what they did for a living. And you'd have lots and lots of conversations and you'd listen to conversations in the family talking about that work. And some conversations will be more interesting than others and if they were interesting you'd ask questions, and people would tell you stories. And if people enjoyed their work. Those stories would be wonderful to hear they'd be enjoyable and be fun to listen to. And that would spark your imagination And you'd want to find out more about it. And the likelihood is that you would probably track a path to the kind of work, that job, because you would know that that is something that you found interesting and enjoyable. And you know that by doing that job, you would be happy doing it. And that's how you would find your career. 

So when people would talk to you about “how did you decide on what job to do?”, you would tell them, talk to people and ask questions and get direction. You would tell them to go away and investigate and read books on it and if they found something they were interested in then that would probably be a job they would like doing.

Now, not everyone will do that - some people will just follow in the footsteps of their parents and others may not have that choice and won’t make that conscious effort and, you know, quite often, when asked, you know, how did you turn out to be a plumber. They would just look at you as if thats the first time they have ever thought about it and they will say “well I don't really know I just sort of fell into it.”

And that's an example of being lost. 

And I think in today's world. What's happening is that we're becoming more and more fragmented, we're becoming more lost. So now when you talk to your father and you ask him. What did you do for a living.

Most fathers, or many fathers may well have had 5,6,7,  - 10 different jobs in their lives. So how do you describe that to your children? What you do, how you came to do what you do. And in a lot of cases, most people have to say, well I did this job because it was available. Then I did this job because it was available then I was made redundant I had to find a job and this job was available. So really all you're describing is a bit like a bit of flotsam on the sea, with every gust of wind and every wave you're getting pushed from left to right. You really don't have any location. You don't know where you're going. You have no direction. One day the wind could be maybe pushing you north. The next day the wind could be pushing you south. The reality is, you don't know where you are, you're lost.

And this is the modern economy. 

What we're being told is the “new normal”, will be that you can't expect to have a job that you're going to enjoy, or a job that you would want. The expectation is that you will do many jobs. And you'll do them because you need a job. And it pays money. And I think that translates into saying, you can expect to be lost. For the rest of your life, to have no certainty, to not be able to locate yourself in space and time. We want you to be a dot on a screen. And when we move the dot. We want you to move to the new dot and do something different. And I think when we listen to the stories of the modern workers, and I'm thinking at the moment in terms of the Amazon workers who pick all our orders that we order over the internet. And they complain about the fact that they have these screens with dots on, and a clock, And they have to get to the dot, and they have to pick something from the location and the moment they've picked it. The screen gives them another dot to go to. And they have to run to that dot.

That doesn't sound like a job to me. That sounds like something a machine should do. That's not something that humans should do. 

Here’s another way of looking at this - When you go to your parents house or your grandparents house, and you look around, and they talk to you, and they probably will talk to you about an item in their household, it could be plates or crockery or a picture. 

Now, there's a long history behind those items. Because, not such a long time ago. We used to choose and buy objects based on a number of “reasons” - maybe we had seen a beautiful object in a friends house and we had asked about it and we liked it. And we'd ask about it and they would say well this came from a small factory up the road, and they'd be making crockery, for example, hand painted crockery for hundreds of years. And my Auntie Jill. She works on the line, and she paints the designs on those. And so I know that these plates were hand painted by a member of our family.

Now think about that for a moment, because what that conversation has done is located, you in relation to a member of your family through an object, which is in your family -  that object locates you in time and space. It gives you a relationship with the past with members of your family. So when you inherit that plate at some stage - you are taking a little bit of history into the future to pass on to your children. So when your children asked you about that plate, you have a story. And you can tell people about the location where that factory was, and the people that worked in it, and how plates were made and why that plate was special. And that is a “form of space” of “location” it’s about “finding” it’s about giving people a position in life in space and time, something that they can relate to. 

Nowadays, What do we do, we go to IKEA, or we order something online through eBay or Amazon. The only thing we know is that it's attractive to the eye. It's cheap or expensive. And it was probably made somewhere in a very large factory, on the other side of the world. It has no meaning to us. Beyond that, it's like, a dot on a screen. It gives us no location, gives us no history. There's no richness to the story of that plate. In fact, it's very hard to see how you could be attached to that plate at all in any way other than to its functionality, in a sense that plate is treating you the same way that the system that Amazon has to pick the item in the warehouse - you are just a dot, a byte of data, the plate is just a byte of data, the picker is just following the dot on his screen and you are getting a small slice of functional reality delivered to your door by a delivery man following a dot on his screen to your door.

All of this just assumes that you do not need any richness of context around that object. It assumes that it's purely functional, that the only thing you're interested in, is that that plate will put food on the table and it can be washed afterwards or even just thrown away. Best of all it was cheap and delivered quickly. 

And when your children or grandchildren come to your house. And they ask about that plate. It's a bit like that man asking you directions to the restaurant earlier in the city. 

“Well, that's a nice plate, they will say” and you will say. Yeah, got it online. That's all you can say - I got it on line,

Maybe you can add a bit of modern context and say “I got it in a black monday sale”

Wow, now tell me we are not lost

Online

Where's that?

 What does that give you? -  nothing, no location, no space, no context. No richness, no story, no history. It's of no help to person that you're talking to. It gives them nothing. It’s not even interesting. 

And that is where we're heading in modern society. 

“So?” you might ask, this sounds pretty dire. What can we do about it.?

Well, we don't have to do anything new. That's the good news. We actually have to do something old. What we have to do is find community.

Now, the longest form of community that you're a member of. When you're on this planet, before you pop your mortal coil is family. Family is your core community, that is your first community, and it is the community you were born into. So, one that has the richest context. The one that you've known the longest. The one that you have the deepest relationship with. Now no matter how fragmented or argumentative, hard or easy or loving your relationship is with your family. It is the deepest form of community you have on this planet. It's where you go when times are hard for support. It's where you go to celebrate.

It's where you go for love. And to give love. It's the foundation of life itself. You cannot be without your family. If you cast yourself away from your family, then you are truly lost until you find some way of replacing that relationship with something as deep and meaningful as possible. And most people who are removed from or lose their families for whatever reason  find another form of family. In another family, they create a family of their own. and for those people that family, their family is the most important thing in the world, because it's replaced what they've lost what they once had -  that deep, deep sense of community with their own family. 

So, we also have other communities. We form communities around common interests. And this is something fundamental to community. So, to have a community, you need to find common interest, communities don't find you, you find communities. So, you need to find out what you are interested in. To start with, before you can find the community.

It's no good, finding a community that changes what it's interested in from one week to the next because the members will all be changing. So one of the definitions of community is a stability around common interest. And one of the reasons why you join a community is because there's a lot of knowledge in that community around that special interest. So it's of value to you. Not only do you learn something from it, not only are you able to contribute something to it, but it is something that you are interested in -  that fundamental set of starting criteria is what allows the community to exist.

In our lives we will all be part of communities, when we go through life, we may be part of many communities, one of them. One of the oldest forms of community on the planet. Older still than your own family, probably, is religion. The church. Now this is a community founded around an idea around principles around a philosophy of life, a way of “looking at things” a way of behaving. It's because it has that strong framework. It's a source of strength for people, and it allows people to locate themselves in society, place themselves, to be able to define their place in society, they can say that I am a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and I believe in these things. And they behave in a certain way according to the guiding principles of that community.

And in a way. What it's a bit like having a map.

It's a bit like someone dropping you in a large city, with a map and saying, you know, if you do the following things and you think this way and behave this way and you travel in this direction. You won't be lost in the city, you will find all the things that you want.

So community is actually what I think the answer is. -  the antidote to where we're going with society, and all of the things I've talked about today are skills that you need to resurrect. If you don't have them or they are growing rusty. 

So think about things. So, when you buy a book on Kindle, or you download a book from the internet. Think about how hard the journey that you have to take normally to find that knowledge that you no longer have to take. And the reason why you don't value knowledge anymore in society -  is it because it's easily accessible?. You can download 20 books on a subject in less than 10 minutes. You therefore have all the knowledge. But the one thing you don't do and most of us tend not to do - is we don't sit down and read all those books. And one of the reasons we don't sit down and read all those books, is because we know it's there. 

So you say to yourself, you know, really, if I really need that knowledge -  well then I'll sit down and read it. That's a bit like, saying, I don't really need to know where I'm going right now. The dot on the screen is telling me where I am, and it'll tell me where I need to go. And that's a bit like Google, Google is the dot and we've downloaded all those books but Oh, I haven’t really got the time to sit down and read those books and try and process and understand all that knowledge now  - I know I’ll Google it instead! 

I don't know what Google turns up, but most of the rubbish I see it writing is the equivalent of the blue dot. It doesn't give you a sense of place or understanding. It just gives you a light snack in information terms or someone's opinion. And if everyone's in the same position that you are, how do you find the person who's actually read the book? How do you find that person who's actually done it. How do you find the person that actually knows his way around the city.  Who can tell you precisely - who can draw that map for you when you ask, how to get home. And that, that is becoming a very rarefied skill. Finding individuals who are not lost, who know their place in the world. To understand what they understand, they have true knowledge, researched put into practice. Learned consistently, they have not gone from one job to the next and be pushed around like a blue dot or a rat in a cage. People who can honestly say, This is who I am. This is what I know. This is what I do. How can I be of service to you. How can I build community with others to help others find their place in this world. 

So if this podcast is about anything. It's about two things. Think about all the skills that you are losing that technology is taking away from you, and ask yourself this question, are you really getting something in return. Or is that just an illusion. Are you losing more than you're gaining. And if you are losing more than you're gaining. Can you learn the skills that you've lost. And the second thing is, how do we counteract the role of technology, how do we find balance with technology.

How do we stop ourselves becoming the lab rats at the hands of technology. 

And the answer is community. Community is an incredibly hard thing to achieve, because it requires a set of skills that we've lost. We've been told for years now. We don't need community we don't need unions. We don't need the church. We're individuals. You've got Google Now you have. Alexa, you have technology you have digital personal assistants that can help you. You don't need to belong to a community, you don't need all that messiness, which is other people and their opinions. You don't need to learn to work and live with other people. Well, that's what we're being told. And that's why we're losing all these skills. And I don't believe that. I think that messiness, that those hard conversations those difficult situations that other humans put ourselves in -  that process of continuously being lost, and having to find out where we are,  - whether that's in our physical location, or in our knowledge, or in our history, or in society -  that finding process is a fundamental human skill. And the moment we lose that we lose ourselves.