2-5 per day? That sounds amazingly high to me. I don't think I find 2-5 things per month that meet your description. As an example, in a week where I particularly care about the music I listen to (which isn't most weeks), I would consider myself lucky to find a couple songs I like. "Like" seems a much lower bar to me than "become friends with".

What I'm getting at is, I can't tell if we are viewing similar experiences through different perceptual lenses or if we really have vastly different experiences of day to day life.

The yearning resonates with me, but the loss expressed in your third paragraph resonates with me more. It was wonderfully fun to be a young person with no virtually no preconceived world views. Everything was up for debate, and that made it possible to spin elaborate all-connecting webs. But, as I get on in life, I find myself accumulating ideas about how the world works that I believe are rational and correct, but also close doors that, in their closing cut off pieces of that all-connecting web.