‘flow’ to describe the happiness that comes from being completely and unreflectively immersed in an activity, whether it’s guitar playing, rock climbing, or studying molecular genetics.

We’ve all experienced some version of pain giving way to pleasure. Perhaps like Socrates, you’ve noticed an improved mood after a period of being ill, or felt a runner’s high after exercise, or took inexplicable pleasure in a scary movie. Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too is pleasure our reward for pain.

What is it that when you do it, you lose track of time because you get lost in it? What do you do that makes you think, “I could do this forever”?

A big part of the Depth Year’s maturing process would be learning to live without regular doses of the little high we get when we start something new. If we indulge in it too often, we can develop a sort of “sweet tooth” for the feeling of newness itself. When newness is always available, it’s easier to seek more of it than to actually engage with

And when it does, it feels like an experience that you fall into—a serendipitous accident. The moment you try to control, define, deepen, or extend it, you are returned, unceremoniously, to your small, chattering mind.

The trajectory here will feel familiar: the night he made that choice, he caught a taste for blood, as it were, a taste for flesh, a passion that primed him to try again. Eventually, that satisfaction of the passion settles into the predictability of a habit—probably just about the time that it’s no longer a pleasure. The honeymoon is over; the thr