Some of the best sparks don’t come from books or rabbit holes. They come from people. Watching someone light up about their thing is like catching fire from their joy. The way they talk about it, the metaphors they reach for, the little obsessions that shape how they see the world, all of that leaks into me. It’s not just learning anymore; it’s borrowing their lens for a while, getting a glimpse of the world the way it glows for them. And that glimpse is addictive.

The Stoics had a word, oikeiōsis, for that stretch in the soul when your sense of self spills outward, enough to hold others, even nature itself. They thought that was the natural destination of reflection and learning. For me, it feels like the same loop I already live in, curiosity feeding discovery feeding meaning, except when it runs through another person’s passion, it widens. The loop becomes ours.

Some people unwind by binge-watching television. I’ve been there too. No judgment. But most often I unwind by falling headfirst into an obscure topic until I can’t tell if it’s 11 p.m. or 3 a.m. No one blinks at the first habit. The second one? People start asking if I’m okay or if I have some sort of “condition.” Which is hilarious, because learning something even utterly useless on the surface, but fascinating, is the most okay I’ll ever be.

If I were being entirely academic, I could call my “intrinsic joy loop” a self-reinforcing cycle of intrinsic motivation fueled by novelty-seeking and dopaminergic reward prediction error. But that’s a mouthful, and honestly, I’d rather just say I follow my “why the hell not” impulses like a bloodhound on espresso.

It always starts with a flicker - novelty detection. Somewhere in the hippocampus, my memory center flags something it’s never seen before. The midbrain’s novelty radar takes note: “This is different. Pay attention.” It could be an odd historical fact, a strange animal behavior, or a piece of science I somehow missed. My brain perks up like it’s just spotted a rare bird.

Then comes the dopamine hit. The ventral tegmental area fires off a reward signal to the nucleus accumbens: “Yes, more of this.” It’s pleasure and it’s a hook, a quiet insistence to keep going. I follow the trail, and before I know it, I’m fully engaged. That’s when the dance between the task-positive network and the default mode network begins. Focus locks in to pull facts together, while imagination weaves them into patterns. Reflection and action switch places so quickly they feel like one continuous motion. This is where I lose track of time - the flow state that makes the rest of the world irrelevant. And finally, the part that keeps it alive - internal reward. No one has to clap, no one has to “like” it, and no outcome is required. The loop feeds itself because the doing was the point all along. I’ve learned that trying to explain this to someone who doesn’t feel it is like throwing cold water on a campfire. So I don’t.

There’s another loop that runs inside the loop - the philosophical one. Once I’ve learned something, my brain starts looking for its echo elsewhere: in history, in literature, in science, in the way two unrelated languages shape a similar idea. It’s another dopamine hit, but richer: the reward of seeing a meta-level pattern emerge. Almost always, those patterns point toward the same center: wisdom hiding in plain sight.

The Stoics, in many ways, were early narrators of this loop - noticing the patterns of human behavior, testing them against reason, and distilling them into principles they lived by. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations read like an unbroken chain of these cycles: observation, reflection, meaning. The Greeks even had a word for the endpoint of such cycles - οἰκείωσις (oikeiōsis) - the natural expansion of our sense of self. I’ve found the same melody in Taoist balance, in the curiosity of Renaissance polymaths, and in oral traditions that carried truth across generations without writing a word. They rarely agree on the details, but they converge on one possibility that’s hard to ignore - that we are more connected than we think, and that meaning lives in the way we engage with the world.

When the pattern resolves, it doesn’t always land there, but it gives hope that it could - that all the scattered threads might tie themselves into the shared hum of human experience, and maybe, if we’re lucky, a quiet kind of peace.

Not everyone experiences this loop with the same intensity. Some of it comes down to temperament - traits like openness to experience, comfort with ambiguity, and even baseline dopamine sensitivity play a role. The prefrontal cortex - your brain’s executive control center - also shapes how well you can hold onto a thread of curiosity long enough to find its reward. For some, the loop feels natural; for others, it’s a muscle that can be built.

I no longer try to convince people to join me on these adventures, it’s not about that. These days it’s about me being unapologetically authentic in this space. Childlike. Presenting others with the opportunity that can give the gift of that spark. But I’ve stopped over-explaining. I've stopped apologizing for how I find joy. I just present my enthusiasm and watch for the ones who lean in instead of blinking politely. Sometimes, quite often actually in some circles, in response to this joy, I’m asked, with amused suspicion, if I have some kind of “condition.” It makes me laugh every time. If I sat passively watching TV for hours, no one would question it. But light up over the mating rituals of anglerfish or the geometry of black holes, and suddenly I’m the one who’s sus.

There are the rare moments - powerful enough to catch your breath - when you share an idea and see someone’s eyes match yours. Not just interest - that same impulse, that fire of why the hell not. You can feel it instantly, that the curious, impulsively-learning parts of you recognize each other. I am so fortunate to call some of these kind of humans my friends.

And when we come together, suddenly it’s not just curiosity anymore - it’s mischievous, almost rebellious. A no-fs-given kind of energy, alive with brains fully engaged, ready to follow a thread not because it’s safe or sensible, but because it’s interesting and fun. It’s the kind of dangerous that doesn’t burn things down - it builds things no one saw coming. And if it’s really good, someone in my particular group will inevitably make a logo for it, just because...

Having fellow loop residents is its own kind of joy - the comfort of knowing you’re not the only one who chooses to live this way. But I don’t wait for company to start. Whether I’m surrounded by kindred minds or diving in alone, the loop spins just the same. And if you’ve never tried it - really tried it - consider loosening just one of the fences you’ve built around your curiosity. It doesn’t have to be big or life-changing; it might be as small as reading about something you’ve never thought twice about, asking a stranger a thoughtful question, or saying yes to something you can’t fully predict. You already know how to do this - you did it as a child, without hesitation, every time you asked “why?” or picked up something just to see what it could do. That instinct is still there. Trust it. Let it tug you somewhere new. You might feel awkward at first, or even a little silly. That’s fine. But once you let yourself follow it, you’ll remember - you’ve been here before. And when the joy clicks in, when you realize you’ve just learned something simply because you could — the answer will be an unshakable, grinning...hell yes!