A funny article by Matt Gross on the website of the Times: “At midday in July, the Tangier medina was a ghost town.
(…)
At last, I reached the top of a final set of stairs, looked around and understood: I’d been here before. There was that same hole-in-the-wall grocery store selling disks of bread, and across from it the old men with wire-frame spectacles sitting on the bench, and beyond them the micro-neighborhood where every child kicking a soccer ball had smilingly mimed the motion of a key in a lock to let me know the area was fermé (closed), every street a dead end. I sighed, starting to sweat. I knew exactly where I was. And I’d failed, for the zillionth time in the last few days, to get lost.
To some of you, that may sound like a strange mission. But the simple fact is, I haven’t been lost since my first trip abroad, almost 30 years ago. It happened during a fireworks show at Tivoli, the grand amusement park in downtown Copenhagen. In the excitement I broke away from my father, and when the explosions died down and the crowd dispersed, I realized that I didn’t know where he was and, worse, I didn’t know where I was. And with my blond hair and blue eyes, I was indistinguishable from a typical Danish child. I blended in. I was lost.
Since then, I’ve developed a good sense of direction. I’m not unerring (just ask my wife), but I never lose track of how to get back to where I started. A sense of direction is something you can’t turn off. Every detail, from the angle of the sun to the direction of the wind, contributes to a mental map that your brain builds subconsciously. It’s like learning to read: Once you know how, you can’t not do it.
Which is why I’ve lately been wondering, how does it feel truly not to know where you are? Are the guidebooks, GPS devices and Internet forums pointing us in the wrong direction? In our efforts to figure out where we’re going, have we lost something more important? Hence this new series, “Getting Lost,” in which every few months I will try to lose my way all over the globe, from developing-world megalopolises to European capitals, from American sprawl to Asian archipelagos. (For the moment, I’ll avoid deep wilderness and deserts; I want to survive.)”

Perhaps this is a sign of true decadence, or at least of prosperity: “What’s your mission?”

“Getting lost.”