For most people in the world, getting lost in a single direction wouldn't mean going very far until you reach civilization.
Today while driving home, my little sister asked "why is there houses on one side of the road and not the other", this road being the city limits of Thunder Bay. This brought up the question of, what is on the other side of the road in the northern direction?
Excluding possible native reserves (too lazy to search them all) and a single rail road track, you would spend
8300km walking nearly directly north until you hit...
Bratsk, Irkutsk. (Bratsk is just the closest city north, there is a village in the Irkutsk region that is directly north)
Until the Trans Siberian Railway, you wouldn't come across a single house...
I guess I live on the northern edge of civilization.