Let’s talk about the last time you got lost on purpose.
Not the panic kind of lost. Not the kind where you’re late and the phone’s dying and you’re wondering who thought this shortcut was a good idea. The other kind. The deliberate kind. Where you turned down a road you didn’t need to be on, just because it was there, just because the app said it would take nine minutes longer and you chose the nine minutes anyway.
Think about the old way. You used to get lost by accident, and getting lost by accident was how you found things. The bakery you’d have never seen. The street you now use on purpose. The neighbourhood you only ever mention because you ended up in it that one time. Nobody plans the wrong turn. But the wrong turn was doing real work. It was putting places in your head that no map was ever going to volunteer.
The machine changed that. Quietly, completely, and in a way almost nobody framed as a loss.
Every navigation app is a prediction engine aimed at one number: shortest time. And it will keep rerouting you, mid-journey, to shave forty seconds off a route you already agreed to. It treats the wrong turn the way it treats any error — as a defect to be eliminated. Not because the wrong turn is bad. Because it’s inefficient. And to a machine, the only question worth asking about a road is how quickly it gets you somewhere else.
Now scale that up. Because the same logic stopped being about roads a long time ago.
The feed decides what you’ll find before you go looking. The recommender removes the shelf you’d never have walked down. The autocomplete finishes the sentence you were still forming. The career algorithm, the route planner for your whole life, tells you the most probable next step and treats every deviation as a correction.
Every one of those systems is the same nav app wearing a different skin. They all share one assumption: that there is a best answer, that you can compute it in advance, and that anything off that answer is waste.
And that’s the part I keep turning over. Because the most valuable things in a life are almost never the ones a machine could have predicted in advance. The marriage that started as a wrong turn. The business that came out of a detour. The friend you only met because you were on the wrong floor. The whole category of what you didn’t plan is the whole category of what made it matter.
The machine isn’t wrong that the wrong turn is inefficient. It’s wrong that efficiency is the point.
So here’s the principle I want to defend. The right to get lost. Not in some romantic way — practically. The right to be off the map. To take the road the algorithm didn’t choose. To arrive late and have found something on the way. To be somewhere your profile didn’t predict, doing something your data didn’t suggest, becoming a person nobody could have modelled in advance.
Because here’s the thing nobody says out loud. A life that is perfectly optimised is a life that never surprises anyone — least of all the person living it. And a person who is never surprised has quietly stopped being the author of their own direction. They’ve become a passenger on a route decided by the average of everyone else’s.
The route is faster. I’m not arguing with that. I’m asking what it costs, and whether we’re the ones choosing to pay it — or whether the choice just got made for us so smoothly we never noticed it happen.
You’ve got this. Next time the map says go straight, and something in you says turn anyway — turn.
That’s not being inefficient. That’s being alive. And it’s the one route the machine can’t reroute you out of.