If I could get away with not having a cellphone, I would honestly much prefer to not have one. Unfortunately, the modern job market and my wife wanting to be able to reach me make it unlikely that I could do so without suffering some fairly major issues.

Initially, I quite liked the idea of being able to consolidate multiple devices, like an e-reader and music player into a single device, but I’ve really come to resent the expectation that I should always be available to contact at all times.

If I could ditch mine, I’d really rather just have some sort of portable device in a similar form-factor that could play connect to WiFi, play music and podcasts and work as an e-reader. Bonus points for some sort of offline map/navigational capacity. I don’t want to get texts or phone calls, and only be able to access email and the broader internet when I’m somewhere with WiFi.

I like to think I’ll eventually get to a point where I can do that without having to worry about being unable to get jobs for not responding quick enough. Unfortunately, it seems like more and more things are trying to make cell phones an unavoidable aspect of participating in society, whether it’s banks only offering OTP texts for 2FA, or so many venues no longer even offering the option to print your tickets at home, but instead requiring you to display your ticket in an app on a device with an active data connection.

Not trying to be facetious, but you just kind of do it. I think it might be something that you just subconsciously keep track of once you really become aware of it. I remember it seeming like magic until I was maybe 15 or so, and then I had landmarks for each direction in my mental map and could figure things out in reference to them. After a bit of that, I could mostly stay oriented when traveling by land, and now it’s not an issue even when I fly somewhere. I went to England for the first time last year, and I had the cardinal directions sorted probably by the time I’d walked from the train to my hotel.

Once you’ve got it down, you just sort of do it on autopilot.