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If you can't take the time to memorize the 4 cardinal directions that have been the basis for navigation for thousands of years, then idk what to tell you.
Memorisation isn't the issue. I know their names and their relation to each other.
But unlike some birds I don't simply see where North is.
I can make a rough estimate based on the position of the sun, if conditions allow.
But if I'm in the subway tunnels or just emerged I might as well spin in a circle and appoint a random direction North. It's certainly not an intuition as it seems to be for some people.I navigate using cardinal directions but don't think I have an internal compass. Had a friend who literally did. You could blindfold her, spin her around a bunch of times then say point north and she could. I live now on a diagonal street, for the first time, and it's honestly difficult for my mind. It took a stupid long time for me to accept that the CORNERS pointed north, south, east and west.
Can't you kind of internally map what you know with where you are? You said subway, so I'm thinking NYC. So let's say you get out at the Financial district. You know the Hudsen River runs north and south and is West of Brooklyn, so you can put the river on your left and establish that you're facing North. If you can't see the river, maybe you can see the One World Observatory, and you know that it's near the river. I can kind of just feel that the river is over there. From there it should be fairly intuitive to retain north as you move around the city. I seem to do all of this at a subconscious level, so maybe it's like you said and it's intuitive for some people and others. But once I can establish one direction, I can retain my internal map and compass as I move around.
If I'm asking directions I'm probably not somewhere where I have a good sense of what's north based on local knowledge. Yeah, I can probably find North here in my home town... But I wouldn't know any of that about New York.
I'm not from NYC either. What I explained above is what I experienced when I visited.
Use a GPS. We all carry a phone...