Levels to this game

We’ve lived a life. Kids. Mortgages. Joe Rogan was cool. We believed the UFOs were coming, and that they would finally explain everything. They never showed up. Then a YouTuber called Elephant Graveyard spent two hours taking Rogan apart, and we slowly understood that he had never been the oracle. He was one of us. A man with a microphone, guessing like everybody else, only louder.

We ate the shrooms. Saw God for about four hours, then had to pick up the kids. We biohacked our way through the entire supplement shelf. Years of keto. Fasting. Carnivore. We got morning sunlight in our eyes because a man with a calm voice told us to, and we stood in cold water for the same reason. We tracked our sleep so hard we stopped sleeping.

Looking back, we wanted two things at once. We wanted to touch something bigger than ourselves, and we wanted to measure it. Transcendence with a dashboard. A generation of grown men trying to feel something, and to have the data to prove it. What we got was a podcast, a protocol, a pill organizer and a man in California taking transfusions of his own son’s blood to live forever.

Then we found sauna, and it felt like coming home.

We know exactly how that sounds. Sauna is the whole decade in one hot room. The Rogan clips. The biohackers. The man with the calm voice, back again to explain heat shock proteins. The promise that it will fix your sleep, your heart, your mood and your marriage. It even feels a bit like a trip, if you stay long enough.

But here is the difference. Sauna was here before anyone knew what a podcast was. Finns have sat in the heat for a thousand years, said nothing, and walked out into the snow. Their grandmothers did this every Saturday. They didn’t post about it. They didn’t have a protocol. They just went.

So this is where we’ve landed: we don’t care if it boosts our growth hormone or cures cancer. We love it. If a study came out tomorrow saying it was slightly bad for us, we’d read the study in the sauna.

Because the best thing about it can’t be measured. Sauna is the pub without the hangover. It’s the third place, neither home nor work, the one everybody says we’ve lost. Except it’s still there, at the end of the pier, and it costs less than a cocktail.

Sauna is the pub without the hangover.

We have kids. One of us has four. Our days are logistics. But we can still steal twenty minutes on a bench with strangers, and in those twenty minutes we’re not somebody’s father or somebody’s employee. We’re warm bodies in a hot room. Nobody has a phone, not because of a rule but because it would melt. We meet people and we actually talk to them, which for a few slightly introverted Norwegians is something close to a miracle. We breathe. We walk into the sea. For twenty minutes we have a life, and then we go back and make dinner.

Do you need anything more than that? No. Go. Sit. Enjoy the heat and the people and the view.

But if those twenty minutes have quietly become the best part of your week, we promise you: there are levels to this game.

Take the ladle. One scoop of water on the stones and the room changes. There’s the hiss, then the half-second of nothing, then the wave hits your face and everyone breathes in at the same time. There’s always one person who throws too much, and always one who thinks that person is a hero. Then someone opens the door. That’s the whole human condition, right there, in a wooden box.

Then there’s the smell. Birch, pine, eucalyptus, whatever. We know the science is thin. We don’t care. After a year of it, our shoulders drop the moment we smell it, before we’ve even sat down. The body learns something the head never could.

There’s breathing, which deserves a page of its own. And there’s music, which has ended friendships.

Put it all together and it’s the closest thing we’ve found to what we were chasing back then. No dashboard. No protocol. Just heat, water, strangers and a door to the sea.

And yes, we went and made an app about it. We see the irony. It won’t fix your sleep or your marriage. It just knows a thing or two about the ladle.

Levels to this game. The first one is free.

KUUME is a free sauna app. Get it here →