A few years back I had a conversation, by chance, that I have re-created many times since and duplicated the results time and again. The circumstances of that original conversation was a GPS that seemed intent on getting us further and further from our destination. I being a guest in the area asked those around me which way was north? I wasn't seeking some on-the-nose vector, just a general dead reckoning. I knew the answer and assumed everyone would see the point of "Oh, that way is north, so if we hit one of these side-roads to the east we should head in the general correct direction until we find a familiar point."  

In answer to my Northern query I received two "That way, I think's" and two "I dunno's". My repeat experiments with this question since then have reaped very much the same results. Sometimes I get this variation, a dig for the smartphone, a search for and swipe of the appropriate app and then a tentative "Um, that way."

          Let's make this story even sadder, often I am in the company of military or law enforcement personnel, folks whom you'd think would have a bit more of a handle on this simple direction query. To be fair, when I ask it of regular folks (whatever that means) the answers are often far more comical. Sadder still, when the answers go a bit awry I ask "Does the sun help you?" Usually, this is followed by a glance at the sky and then a blank look back to me. I prompt again "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that help any?"

With some, it does help, but...about 50% of the time it seems to confuse the matter.

I'm a quote-heavy/heuristic guy so let's get one of these out of the way:

"In the application of your principles you must be like the pancratiast (boxer/wrestler, i.e. the first Mixed Martial Artist), not like the gladiator; for the gladiator lets fall the sword which he uses and is killed; but the other always has his hand, and needs to do nothing else than use it."-Marcus Aurelius

The Emperor is not guiding us to become minimalist or survivalist preppers, or to go cold turkey Luddite, but rather he offers a reminder that in the midst of all our technological wealth, amongst all of our helpful gear it might be wise to retain/train at least a modicum of skills/abilities that might be pertinent to everyday life if you ever found yourself without your toy/tool of choice.

Another recent conversation, by the way, all participants-grown men--in the event of a flat tire they all agreed that calling someone to change the tire was the solution. A poll revealed none of them had ever changed a tire. I asked what if the flat tire occurred in a remote area and you lacked signal or the call would result in a long wait, could you do it?

Lots of surprising uncertainty.

Again, this is not a call for complete rugged individualism (I'm not arguing against it either) but more of a "Come on, don't you want to be able to do or know a little something?" Is it just possible that our tools, apps, gadgets, smartphones, GPS, et cetera, make it just a bit too easy to assume that this knowledge will always be at our fingertips? Does access to Wikipedia mean that you yourself really know anything beyond how to locate a website and read an article? And in the case of smart tools (apps and services) does that not mean that we ourselves know less and less and farm out our abilities, our intelligence, our development of character in the face of adversity-even adversities as small as "The GPS is wrong, now what?"

I'm all for energy-saving machinery/devices but is there perhaps some merit/danger in the idea of being "too comfortable"? Most of us now know nothing at all about the night sky because we can read about it on Wikipedia or look at images of it at Astronomy.com. But is this really the same thing as knowing something about what lies overhead every night of our lives?

Emerson warned us of this

 trend: "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little, and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind."

This may be a subtle point I'm making (perhaps inconsequential to most circumstances), but just as it is possible to trade liberty for security can we trade ability for comfort-ability?

So right now, which way is north? Can you change a tire? Can you locate and point to three constellations? How many things in your everyday life do you actually know without consulting a crutch outside of yourself?