Newton's Third Law applied to Learning

This post is gonna talk a bit about Newton’s Third Law of Motion in the context of psychology or specifically the process of learning.

Newton’s Third Law is described as follows:

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

or in simpler words: if you push something it pushes back.
This may be a bit oversimplified so here is another basic example: when swimming you are enacting a force onto the water which then reacts by applying the opposite force onto you which is what propels you forwards.

The law itself is intended to be applied around physics some other studies also to have a similar principles but I want to specifically focus on one thing for which I have still not found an answer and which haunts me to this day, but some context is needed here to find out how I got here:

When I was younger I once had a fever dream (or maybe a hallucination, I am not sure how awake I actually was and if me wandering around the house at midnight actually happened or not) where I woke up and was overwhelmed by the thought that everything I have learned can be quantified in some way and that the action of learning will have a reaction in some way or form. In my head this was all scaled on two bars, one going to the right to show everything that has been learned and one going to the left that shows the “reaction”, both bars grew steadily but the growth of the reaction terrified me to the core.

But what is this reaction? I’ve been trying to explain this but the whole subject sets my brain into fight or flight mode so I never found a conclusive answer but there some possibilities:

• the realization that for everything that has been learned something else cannot be learned due to our limited capabilities as humans?
• the sacrifices that needed to be made to achieve something
• a reaction that eats away at something
• some spiritual thing where an action in one place results in an opposite reaction somewhere else, meaning that if you learn something someone else is now unable to

I do not know the answer but the subject debilitates me because I see this pattern in a lot of places, I hope that one day I’ll find an answer.