How do people find their niche?

The Melville Society is dedicated to the study and appreciation of the nineteenth-century American author Herman Melville, writer of Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, such short stories as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” and several volumes of poetry, including Battle-Pieces and the epic Clarel.

We publish the award-winning journal Leviathan and meet twice a year for fellowship and scholarly discourse at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association. We also sponsor International Conferences and tours every other year.

How? How do you one day wake up and decide to join the Melville Society and meet once a year to discuss Moby-Dick, again? I am not saying it's a bad choice, or an arbitrary one, it just surprises me often that people have the clarity of direction to snuggle into one of the quazillion cultural niches offered by pursuits of the mind, and pick it as their own. I'm baffled, amused, curious, and slightly in awe of it. I feel the same way towards these people who join the Melville Society as I do towards someone who decides to live up a tree house, or only eat peanut butter sandwhiches, or that they are going to pick a language to study - 'great!' I think. 'Funky and cool thing to do... but how the hell did you get to that decision? And how did you make it?' How do people find their niche?