When something in you changes so drastically that it gets hard to be around friends and family, there’s a mismatch in frequencies. My girl and I have lived that. We’d just come home from six months in Thailand. Norway is safe, nice, and a rich-bitch country, but it isn’t the best for us. Now we practise simple living.
In March 2019 we had to leave the country. It was a dramatic few days — not because Nordic nature and society are so bad, but because of how unpredictable it was and how little choice we had.
Then we came back to Norway, and it wasn’t pleasant. Here’s the backstory. You may recognise yourself somewhere in it.
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When you’re forced to make changes
How would you feel about leaving your own apartment to go and live in a country on the other side of the world?
That’s what we decided to do, and it wasn’t pleasant at first. It felt like a forced move.
In case you didn’t see the video on why we left Norway, the short version:
My girl is from California, and in December 2018 she came to stay with me in Norway. As a tourist she had 90 days. Getting the paperwork done so she could actually live with me — even though I could provide for her — turned out to be much harder than expected.
And “Norway Inc.” wanted around $1,000 just to process the application. Fuck that.
Her 90 days were running out and we had to come up with something.
We bought tickets to Thailand. Destination: Chiang Mai.
An unexpected outcome of joy in Thailand
Once we were there, things started flowing in line with what we actually wanted. More and more I wanted simple living — less stuff, less mental overload.
Everything we needed — income, a place to stay, a run of good outcomes for both our businesses — started arriving once we got to Chiang Mai. We both work online.
My girl had real success growing her community, running her courses and building her presence.
We lived well too. Here’s the video on how we found our Chiang Mai condo with a Zen garden and a big pool. It was a small apartment — simple living, with just enough to have a good time.
What being thrown into the unknown actually gave us:
- A shove out of the routine of being stuck
- Back into forward motion — progress and new openings
- Healthier food, for a lot less money
- A beautiful apartment with a Zen garden outside it
- Real motivation to work on our goals and our businesses
- New connections with some genuinely interesting people
- The push to clear out a lot of old rubbish once I got back to Norway
- It taught us to trust the process, and the Universe
After six months, though, it was time to go back to Norway — for me especially. And we were returning to my home country with nowhere to live.
Three months before we went back, in June 2019, my sister had asked to take over my apartment. I said yes. It saved me $500 a month and it was meant to clear the way for somewhere better for the two of us.
Our plane landed at Gardermoen one September afternoon. We’d come from 35 degrees and landed in 5. It was fresh.
Baggage claim, new sim cards, then the airport train into central Oslo, where I’d booked us a room.
That evening we started to feel it. Norway wasn’t pleasant to come back to.
Going back to the old after six months of happiness
One thing I’d noticed in Chiang Mai was the peaceful energy of the city, and the way Thai people greet you. You don’t find that in Norway. Norwegians would generally rather not talk.
Our first evening back: drunk people screaming, fights, sex workers calling out to men on the street, and a general wall of noise in the cold, rainy dark. Not magical.
Yes, that’s Norwegians enjoying themselves. Yes, it’s a cold Nordic country. And yes, Thailand has all of the same trades. But we didn’t experience any of it that way in Chiang Mai.
There was a mismatch in energy that did not harmonise with us.
We left Oslo. With my apartment gone, we arranged to stay with a friend of mine — a single guy living alone in a very nice house he’d renovated himself.
Comfortable enough for the first few days. Then the feeling of being back in the old, slow, conventional 9-to-5 world, surrounded by people running identical mindsets, started to get depressing.
We’d come from somewhere warm, bright and vibrant, full of people with goals who were working on them, eating better and practising meditation.
I felt like I’d come back to Hobbit land, where most people haven’t seen the outside of the forest.
And the cost of what we’d left was obvious. My girl was cut off from the friends she’d found in Chiang Mai. She couldn’t host her courses. We struggled to find anywhere decent to work from or eat well — never mind what you pay in Norway to live healthily at all.
Add the dark, cold, gloomy weather at that time of year, and the momentum we’d built in Thailand started leaking out. We both got low. My girl was struggling, and I could see this wasn’t a landscape to live in.
Not helped by the fact we didn’t feel fully at home in someone else’s house.
Home to simplify, reset and prepare
Coming back was something we had to do, but we had plans beyond just being home.
Norway is safe and wealthy and the people are nice. But nice isn’t the same as good for us. A lot of people here are closed-in and low, particularly through autumn. And for a country this comfortable, the suicide rate is higher than it has any business being. That’s worth sitting with rather than explaining away — comfort and safety clearly aren’t the whole of what people need.
First job on getting back was clearing out my old apartment. I was brutal about it. I got rid of 70% of what I owned.
Sold or binned. And honestly?
It feels good. Getting rid of old energy is a relief. All that stuff sitting there occupying space and asking to be maintained and looked after.
So I came home to simplify and reset — to make room for something new, and to get ready to head back to Thailand.
What was left of my belongings went into a storage locker in my home town with a solid key lock on it.
A security tip while we’re here: don’t buy the cheap combination padlocks. They’re useless. Out of curiosity I tried a few in that storage facility and had them open in anywhere from twenty seconds to five minutes. Buy a key lock.
When you experience a mismatch in your reality
I talk a lot about dimensional shifts in my work. It’s about making people aware of their own reality in a metaphysical way.
A shift is taking place on this planet on a number of levels. It’s been building for years, and it’s been spiking recently.
That shift in consciousness produces changes in you too. Sudden changes in your reality — family, work — and almost certainly emotional ones.
Your life rearranges itself around it. The trouble starts when people have no idea what’s happening to them, because nobody ever gave them the framework for it.
So if you’re in a period where you feel:
- Something in your life is changing and you’re confused by it
- Connections to some friends and family don’t feel the same
- Your work is losing its meaning
- An urge to simplify, and possibly to move
- A need to change how you eat
— then the shift is working on you as well.
This is not the time to grip the old ways — old habits, old friends, the same routines, the same job, the same place to live.
Be flexible, open and fluid in what you decide, so you can move with the changes instead of bracing against them.
What is the “shift” we’re talking about?
The changes on the planet — the shift, the “New Earth” — are part of a planetary upgrade that’s been described for a very long time. The Maya described it. The Bible describes it. Indigenous peoples around the world describe it.
And it’s happening. If it frightens you, educate yourself. Gain some insight. Just don’t expect the usual channels or the school system to be the place you find it.
The old, unhealthy, out-of-balance systems on this planet are falling apart. It’s shifting and cleaning itself out, and the effect of that is a dimensional shift.
Which is why you’ll experience it in your own life too — as changes in the people, things and places around you.
How your reality may change
You may watch friends or family fade out of your reality. Long-standing connections stop feeling right. Your job or your studies take a turn you didn’t plan.
It runs both ways. You’ll be fading out of theirs. That’s what happened to us.
I’d talked to friends about exactly this — that changes were coming, and that they might well happen between us. I go after deeper knowledge and I’m aiming at growth. For the people around me who aren’t, I was always going to start disappearing from their day-to-day in some way.
When you change and tune up your awareness, your frequency changes, and that puts you somewhere else.
And that’s what happened. We faded out of our friends’ reality in Norway. We went out of reach — by popping out on the other side of the world, which was about as different a reality as we could have picked.
Other things you may notice: different food cravings, the urge to simplify, a need to get away from conventional media and entertainment.
So what’s your next move?
We noticed immediately how it felt to drop back into the old reality — same routines, same landscape, same friends doing the same thing and thinking the thought that keeps them doing it. Every day.
So we were pushed into seeing what’s actually good for us. And we knew we wouldn’t be staying in Norway.
Just having the plan, and knowing what was coming because we’d decided it, felt good on its own.
So what’s your next move? What do you feel is coming for you — and what are you going to do with it?
Postscript, 2026 — what actually happened
I wrote everything above at the end of 2019, sitting in Norway with a plan to get back to Thailand.
A few months later the world shut its borders. So the timing went out of the window entirely — which is worth saying, because this is exactly the part people get wrong about trusting the process. Trusting it does not mean the schedule holds. It means the direction holds.
And it did. We got back to Thailand, and I ended up living there for years — building the business, in a condo, working from cafés, a long way from that storage locker.
Then in December 2023 I left Thailand for Norway. By choice that time, not because of a visa clock. Which is the part I find interesting: the same country I couldn’t wait to get away from in this article turned out to be exactly where I wanted to be, once I was the one deciding. That story is here.
I’m leaving the 2019 version above untouched rather than tidying it into hindsight. It’s more useful as evidence this way — someone mid-shift, not knowing how it lands, which is where you probably are if you’re reading it.
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