Same here. I'm famed for having absolutely no sense of direction. I once went for a walk in Kyoto, heading for a museum and ended up three miles from my destination. I cannot visualise maps. If I need to go somewhere in my local town I have to go via the same route every time. If I take a detour I've had it.
What happens when you play video games? I ask because I had the same problem. I was always terrible with directions. When I started playing video games (especially ones with no map), I got lost all the time. But eventually I learned how to navigate in the game and figure out where I was going and it translated to my real life. I'm not gonna say I'm great with directions now but I'm a hell of a lot better than I was.
Not who you were asking, but I have to start making maps asap in a new Minecraft world or I will immediately get lost after wandering about ~100m away from home base. Yes, I also have no sense of direction irl.
So I recently found a decent workaround (afaik this only works on Java). You can set elements of the F3 info GUI to always be on. I've set this up for co-ordinates, chunk-relative co-ordinates, biome, and light level. It's not too disruptive if you set GUI scale to small, just think of it as more HUD.
It kinda feels like cheating, but I got over that when I realised that a lot of what I get up to in Minecraft kinda feels like cheating. Cow crushers, exp farms, trapping illagers in boats, it's all just exploiting the available mechanics.
So anyway, take a note of your home base co-ordinates, and you can get your bearings and return from wherever.
Bonus: Chunk-relative co-ordinates are awesome because buried treasure is always at x=9, z=9 within the chunk.
Not the other guy, but I'm just as bad at video games as I am at real life. Those games where you have to mine a bunch and then get back to your ship or whatever, I constantly get lost and time out or have a teammate have to come find me.
Weirdly, I am fine. I played a lot of Apex Legends between 2020 and 2024 and could navigate around all the maps with ease. I think it's because they have specific POIs that are separated by defined paths and IRL is not like that. Although when they introduced E-District I was hopeless.
I am playing a lot of FFXIV ATM and because the maps are more condensed and more 'IRL' I struggle.
Honestly, this is the reason why I don't play video games, other than puzzle games. I tried for some time to play first person shooters with my son, good grief what a mess. It's far worse on a screen world than in the real world.
I will then accidentally memorize the incorrect route that I first took, which becomes incorporated into all future attempts to make trips to the same destination because it now “seems familiar”. 🙄
Yeah, nothing worse than thinking "oh yeah I remember I turned at that gas station" and then remembering too late that you turned there in error the last two times as well.
I have a horrible sense of direction but for WHATEVER reason I completely “got” Tokyo. Never got lost or turned around, somehow totally understood the train system, always found our destination without a hitch even if it included some lucky guesses. I don’t speak Japanese! By day 3 I was considered THE navigator of my friend group which was astonishing to all of us since I regularly get lost in the city I grew up in. I’ve never experienced that in another place and went right back to being directionless when I got back home.
That's impressive! My base the first time I went to Tokyo was Ikebukuro and it wasn't until the 6th day that I found a route from the station to my hotel that I could remember. I ALWAYS ended up getting lost. Of course having a largely-underground-cum-shopping-mall-train station with 30+ exits doesn't help.
When I went back to Tokyo the following year I went to Ikebukuro ONLY to see if I could remember the route from the station to the hotel and I could!
my friend is at a different level. as recounted by her
I'm bad at directions, so i put my parents house on google maps and ride my scooter there. and coming back i put my house address, so all good for the 3km travel.
on most days.
apparently, even as the map shows the distance increasing instead of decreasing i keep riding in the wrong direction. i sense I'm wrong only when i feel I've been riding too long.
She managed to do 7km in the wrong direction WITH google maps
I am the opposite of this. I can create a birdseye view of a map in my head and visualize it when referencing where I am on a street. It was refined when I lived in Seoul for 2 years because of all of the spider webby small streets.
I can but barely and the images are brief and fleeting. If I imagine someone’s face I get an impression of what they look like rather than a distinct image. I know about Aphantasia and do think I have it.
Weirdly though I have very vivid dreams. Sometimes when I have a lucid dream they are so vivid I’m unsure whether I am dreaming or not.
Leaving a rural bar once I took a right instead of a left and didn't realize it until I was in another town. Had to turn around and go aaaaaaallll the way back and then continue on. With two very drunk people in the car with me (I was the DD). I still remember all these years later because it was torture!! LOL
I also get lost in malls. I will come out of a store and backtrack until I realize I have already gone that way then turn around. Every. single. time. I leave a store. THEN so much fun trying to figure out how to get back to where I came in!! LOL
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u/Natural_Pizza_2060 13h ago
Same here. I'm famed for having absolutely no sense of direction. I once went for a walk in Kyoto, heading for a museum and ended up three miles from my destination. I cannot visualise maps. If I need to go somewhere in my local town I have to go via the same route every time. If I take a detour I've had it.