When the Noise is Off, the Music Can Play

Issue No. 5 : How we can learn anything we really desire – on our own

Learning how to surf during the pandemic by imitating friends and spending a lot of time in the ocean practicing. Photo: Per Håkansson.

I recently turned off or deleted all my social media accounts to see if the world would come crashing down on me but it didn’t. Instead something magical happened: I started to remember my forgotten dreams from years past.

Stuff like traveling around Europe in a VW bus in search of the perfect wave, spend a season in the French Alps or in Japan to ski my heart out, and learn how to skydive and jump out of planes in the most beautiful places.

It was almost like my true imagination had been imprisoned and as soon as I turned off all the mainstream ideas, delivered by well-oiled algorithms in digestible daily chunks, I was unshackled and let out to roam as I pleased.

I felt relieved, and somewhat proud that I had kicked another addiction. It felt like life now belonged to me again and that I could do whatever I wanted.

But let’s be back up a little as there are a few things that lead me to this new wild path: spending lots of time in solitude and stillness over the past ten months, getting back into practicing swimming, and reading lots of wonderful books.

The outside world is in our face 24/7 and I don’t think we understand how much we are impacted by all the noise (some people call it information). So stepping off the merry-go-round to spend time in nature on my own has been really healing. I feel I’ve reclaimed myself and created stronger boundaries, alas no social media.

The second thing that has really had a great impact on the quality of my life over the past year is the return to swimming. I’ve learned that nothing makes me feel so good in this world as doing daily laps in the pool. And I’ve tried lots of stuff.

Well, maybe reading really great books. I think they fuel each other and I think, no I know, that I need both daily. So as I’ve been edging out of social media I’ve been ramping up my daily swim and reading practices.

The goal for this year is to swim every day the pool is open (29/31 days in January) with weight training every third day, and to read 100 books (about 8 per month).

But what this is really about is learning, learning because it’s fun and exciting, learning because it’s an adventure and what guides us to become better. Learning from a place of purpose, passion, and meaning, and not only for career or money.

So by gradually turning off the social media firehose and spend time listening to my true inner desires, I finally reached a stage where they felt unafraid to resurface without mockery or shame for being youthful or naive.

Because what youth is really about is freedom and joy, learning and growing, discovering oneself and the world, exploring the unknown. It’s an inside job and has nothing to do with the way you look, your age, or your social status.

But over time, the “reality” sets in and we all start to chase the same things. First to survive and then to thrive according to the upper echelons and the advertising puppet masters.

We postpone our dreams until we are retired (financially) but by then we have invested too much in our perception of the world and bought the idea that it’s time to slow down, that we’re too old, that it would look silly or even worse.

I was on that path too until I got back into swimming and decided to get really good at first breaststroke and then freestyle. Just because I read in several books that we have been wrong about the aging process and what we can really achieve.

That fueled my desire to uncover my true physical and mental potential, and I began practicing swimming again and over a period of six months went from swimming 2,000 yards breaststroke in 56 minutes down to the not too shabby 36.

I also wanted to understand the limits of my intellectual capacity and began reading books more frequently and learning a new language. And I think my return to deep learning, to autodidactism, is what’s making all this possible.

The Internet is awesome in this way. Before and after my swim practices I’ve been studying the best swimmers in the world via YouTube, cognitively learning the strokes and then practicing hour after hour in the pool.

But social media is unfortunately the antithesis of deep learning: shallow and distracting by design. There are a lot of people saying good things but they are often out of context and lack real depth, they lack actionability.

So when I think back at my youth (in age, not mindset) I remember a few of all the things I wanted to learn and them telling me who I really am: