---
date: 2018-02-08
modified_at: 2018-03-07
tags: [lifestyle, philosophy, productivity]
description: A reflection on the concept of intermittent hyper immersion shifts and how regularly changing environments accelerates personal growth and learning through challenging assumptions.
---
# Why I went to Bali and why I don’t know where I’m going next

I just arrived in Bali and I already got this question at least 5 times: How
long are you staying here? Where are you going next? My answer is I don’t know.
And I will now explain you why.

I practice a habit of having intermittent hyper immersion shifts: This is a term
I just coined (I like to coin terms, it makes things more clear and easy to
remember, in my eyes). So... But let me now give my definition of a HIS:
Whenever you immerse yourself in a completely different world, you will see the
whole world in a different way. You learn extremely fast in all facets of life
because you had hundreds of small assumptions that prove untrue. Your beliefs
will, therefore, become more general and coherent. Doing this regularly will,
therefore, spark your brain and force it to learn. To change. To grow. Moments
of change are moments of struggle, but also moments of learning.

Until I was 23, I only had a few of such moments: going to elementary school,
going to high school, and going to university. Maybe I’m exaggerating with this
amount, and maybe there were some small immersion shifts, but I’m not lying if I
say I think that my life became way faster in the past, let's say 2 years. Or
slower, however, you want to call it; because I got so much more done and
learned so much more in a smaller amount of time!

How come? Well, my theory now is that once I started traveling, the amount of
such ‘hyper immersion shifts’ has grown:

Going to Kathmandu, Nepal in September 2016 was the first.
Going to Thailand and Vietnam was the second (December 2016 until the end March
2017).
Going to a digital nomad scene environment in Chiang Mai was the third (April
2017),
Going back home was the fourth (May 2017)
The digital nomad environment continued in Europe from June until September
2017.
Creating my own imagined perfect environment for coding and kiting has been the
fifth shift, in Tarifa, Spain (September 2017 until December 2017)
Going home again in January 2018 just made the previous time in that environment
more evident and just confined my then attained beliefs.
Now, it’s February 2018 and I’m in Bali, where I am trying to live like a king
with incredible coding + entrepreneurial productivity, social life and fitness.
Although I’ve lived like this before, it is very hard for my mind to get used to
it and I know it takes some getting used to (probably because hormonal
regulations and blood levels and stuff I don’t know much about). Nonetheless, it
is very interesting to see that there are so many, small and big, things that I
just forgot about and am amazed and thrilled by.

So that’s why I went to Bali. To make another hyper immersion shift. And the
effect is enormous. There are so many differences between living in Groningen
and living in Bali...

I don’t know what the next hyper immersion shift is going to be because it
probably will depend on my needs, which I can’t know yet.