Why the map?

Of all the distractions on the internet, the biggest one is Google Maps to me.

Many times a day, I just want to look up a town or find a distance. As soon as I found my location, the itch to click on the 'Satellite' button becomes overwhelming. I always click on that button with the disclaimer: I will just check out the terrain around the city.

I think deep down, there are several desires, which cause the '3D-compulsion':

• Being able to fly over the landscape
• Marveling over the resolution of houses, trees and bridges.
• Imagining the 96 uni-shaders in my graphics card processing those millions of vertices
• The sheer awe that I feel as I am rendering Planet Earth to 10cm precision on my screen.
• The Explorer Instinct

This compulsion has good and bad sides to it:

Wasting time
Reducing productivity
Leaving me feeling useless
Replacing wanderlust

Discovering places
Adding knowledge about geography
Learning: stumbling upon cool features of our planet
Satisfying my never-ending hunger for exploration


There has been several stages of this Maps-Compulsion:

1. At about age 6, I was reading maps and atlases and we played the Capitals-Game with my granddad. He would tell me a capital and I would have to respond with its country
2. At age 15, my geography teacher (Simon Gyuri) told me personally to try something that will blow my mind: Google Earth. I was baffled at first at the resolution and the textures' accuracy, but then I realized that I could incline the landscape and that it was in fact a 3D-rendering of the real world!!! It was one of my life's major wow moments.
3. I had episodes of binge-flying within Google Earth. In fact, it has an integrated flight simulator. I would fly from airport to airport around the world in an F-16 fighter. Sometimes I'd take overnight flights, ie. going to sleep on auto-pilot and resume the flight in the morning on the other side of the planet. I particularly loved to guess where I was flying from geographical features and cities, ie. no labels.
4. Throughout my adult life, a fuel for my travels was the excitement, that I could go to those places that I knew so well on the map. From time to time, I would close my eyes and picture myself on the map, amazed by how far I've come and how different this place is.
5. At about age 25 I started to learn the sky map. I realized that the sky was the surface of a sphere, just like Earth's surface is. There are curious places on the sky, just like on Earth's surface. I have been learning the exact positions of constellations ever since.
6. Since 2018, Google Earth got integrated into Google Maps and it got only one click away from any maps search. It is causing my newest surge of obsessive-compulsive geographical exploration.

As with so many things in life, there is no way to judge if it is actually good or bad, black or white. It is just like this with me. My rationalization heuristic will take care of justifying anyways. Several years from now, with only the geographical knowledge and the memory of excitement of exploration remaining and the guilt long gone, I will be glad that I spent all this time browsing Planet Earth.