I'll be honest, I'm not sure why I should feel nostalgic about inconvenience. Getting lost is a major inconvenience, it creates anxiety, wastes time, and all around just sucks.
GPS greatly reduces all of those things at the expense of... I'm not sure what honestly. The article was short on that part - or at least, to me, the benefits felt like inconveniences reframed as excitement and entertainment. I'll pass on this and most of the 'I miss the good ol days when life was harder ' genre.
I don't miss the days of stopping at a gas station for directions. I don't miss taking the slower route because I didn't have traffic updates redirecting me. I don't miss inconvenience for its own sake.
To each their own, but I really don't get this inconvenience nostalgia period we find ourselves in.
I also dont miss the days without GPS bike computers, having to navigate route with printed out google maps sheets just to realize the resolution was not high enough for my route and I had to stop at every 3rd intersection to confirm I'm still on the right track.
You're losing out on the "inconvenient" getting lost experiences, which it appears you are focusing on, as well as the "serendipitous" getting lost experiences.
Sounds like you had a bunch of bad times getting lost in the past. Maybe you're just not particularly open to new experiences.
If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.
There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.