Finding my Waze.

I was driving home to my parent’s new house a few weeks ago when the worst thing imaginable happened, I closed out of my Waze app in the middle a dead cell zone. I had driven to their house a few times over the past year, but still feel completely lost without my app on my phone. This has become true for most trips I take, I feel incredibly insecure when I can’t look down and confirm I’m heading the right direction. As I drove “blindly” down this country road I started to question what I recognized, panicking I repeatedly glanced down at my phone praying to get service back. This whole ordeal caused me to miss a slight turn, but soon after I was able to find service and it all only added 15 minutes to my trip. After returning home I began explaining this stressful event to my parents which lead straight into a speech from my father about millennial dependence on technology.

This got my reflecting on driving before apps, my family always took long road trips to places we had never traveled before. First there were the books of maps we kept in the backseat pockets, I remember my mom getting so frustrated trying to bring me to practice at a new location and pulling these out. Then it was google maps on our desktop, my dad would spend hours mapping out our road trips and printing out the google map directions to bring with us. Then our family purchased a Garmin GPS to guide us on our trips. My dad still printed out google maps documents to use along with the GPS as he tested out the technology. Over time technology has always evolved and changed the way we did things, and my parents took advantage of it every step of the way. Is it really a millennial addiction problem that I now use my phone for directions, or am I just using the newest form of technology? I think technology is constantly getting more convenient and user friendly, more so than it ever has. The same way my parents tried and used the newest and simplest way to travel I’m doing the same, it just now comes straight from my pocket. Wouldn’t it be ignorant to not take advantage of the technology I already have and inefficiently resort to using older technology?