" When I was seven years old, my daddy caught me smoking a cigar. Locked me in a broom closet for two days and two nights with nothing more than a box of cigars and a book of matches. No food, Brewster. No water, just those god damn cigars. Wouldn't let me out till I finished every last one of them. Taught me one HELL of a lesson!"

I think you and I got the Brewster's Millions treatment.

Around 2010 I was at the heart of the Shoreditch startup scene and we had boxes and boxes of iPhones sent to us by Apple. I literally had 4 or 5 iPods and iPhones on my work bench for messing about with. All the time I kept a Nokia as my actual phone and adopted the drug dealer's creed of "Never use the product". Something just clicked inside. I could see these things as very useful palm sized tablets. Cute. Probably "the future" , but I didn't actually have a use for them. Somehow that stuck.

>navigation I just look up where I want to go on a map and just drive there.

This is one of the two reasons I believe I cannot get rid of a phone. After getting lost in a not great neighborhood in the 1990's and getting jumped, I have pretty severe anxiety about travel to places that I am unfamiliar with. GPS has been a godsend.

And pictures of my kids. There is no more convenient way to take constant pictures and videos of my kids than with my phone. I don't remember entire years of my life, and therefore their lives. But I have pictures and videos to remind me!

From my observations, people's innate ability to relate a map to the world varies. There are some studies attempting to tie this to gender, but my experience is that is not a hard line at all. I'm sure training is a component, of course, but some folks do not tie the abstraction to the real world well at all.

I seem to be good at it, but no one in my wife's family is, so during family get-togethers on that side I'm usually driving or navigating. The fact I can retrace a path I took two years prior from memory is an astonishing feat to them.

When I'm inside the house (any house, but including my own), I often point to a direction when talking about a nearby place. People laugh and correct me because the place I'm talking about is to the north, not to the south as I point out with my finger. I can't go back to a place I was last week without asking for directions. I walk and turn the wrong corner in familiar environments, etc.

I love GPS now.

> I love GPS now.

The dependence of GPS has made people lose their spatial awareness.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0