WARNING

My phone died the other day and I spent forty minutes circling a neighbourhood I do not know well. Looking back, it matters more than it sounds.

It is not that I cannot walk. Fifteen years ago, going out meant reading a map first, memorising a few landmarks, repeating “two blocks east, then north” under my breath, and then, on arrival, correcting yourself by the position of the sun and the house numbers. Finding your way was a whole sequence of acts: look, remember, walk, go wrong, fix it. Now the sequence compresses into one sentence — “in two hundred metres, turn right.” What gets saved is not only the time but those five or six steps themselves.

I think often about where ability actually lives. Not in results — in the process. Mental arithmetic grows out of the irritation of getting a sum wrong and starting again; a feel for words grows out of the hesitation of writing, deleting, writing again; judgement grows only after you have seen enough wrong examples with your own eyes. A tool pulls the middle steps out and hands you the result. Very clean, and very empty.

Someone will say this is simply efficiency, and what is there to complain about. Fair enough. The convenience is real, and I am not going to switch off the navigation “to train myself” — that position borders on self-harm. What I object to was never the tool, but handing over your way back along with it. Whether to use a thing is a choice; whether you still could without it is your footing. Confuse the two and you get a great deal of confident foolishness.

There is a further consequence worth worrying about: skip the process and you lose the ability to check the result. Someone who can reckon a bill sees at a glance when one is wrong; someone who once knew the roads can feel that the navigation has gone round the houses for no reason; someone who has read a few books knows within two pages whether a piece holds together. Conversely, a person who has never been through the process has only two attitudes available to any output — total acceptance or total suspicion. The vast middle, the part experience is supposed to fill, is empty.

These last few years the problem has sharpened. Machines write, calculate, translate, and they write more smoothly than most people, so “I do not need to know how” has become a perfectly natural sentence. What I see is usually the opposite: the better someone is with a tool, the more likely they are to go through it themselves first and let the tool fill in after; the less they understand, the more they expect one sentence to buy a finished product — and then can neither fault it nor say what is good about it. The first kind of efficiency compounds. The second is one-off.

Nor should we run to the other extreme. Some steps genuinely should be surrendered: keeping accounts by hand, memorising phone numbers, remembering bus routes. Nothing is lost by dropping those, because the abilities behind them no longer have anywhere to live. So the work is to tell which steps are muscle and which are only ritual. The test is simple — after you cut it, do you still have judgement left? If all that remains is receiving, you have traded your foundation for a lease.

So I have set myself a rather petty rule: if a stretch of road can be walked, walk it; if a sum can be done in my head, do it first; if a problem comes up, think about it for three minutes before searching. Not for the sake of hardship — to keep something in reserve. A reserve shows no value in good times; it only weighs something on the day the tool fails. And tools always fail. That is the one reliable thing about them.

Those extra forty minutes on the street were, in the end, tuition I owed for the past ten years, paid late, and only in part.

Written by Bu Shi