Welcome to On Fire.

This is a space for anyone who’s ever felt flat, stuck, or secretly hungry for more.

It’s where I explore two deeply connected questions:

What does it take to live a passionate life?
And what does it actually mean to feel alive?

Through essays, interviews, and raw dispatches, I explore how we reignite our spark —
and how we keep it alive.

Who I Am

I’m Krista Stryker — writer, jiu-jitsu athlete, and founder of the Human Aliveness Lab.

That search — for aliveness, for meaningful intensity — has shaped everything I do.

It started with movement. After college, I felt numb. Disconnected from meaning.
Then I discovered high-intensity training — and it changed everything.

I built 12 Minute Athlete, a global fitness brand and app that’s helped hundreds of thousands of people rediscover their inner athlete.

But even as I chased peak performance, I started noticing something was missing.
A kind of spark. A deeper why.

I didn’t want to just optimize — I wanted to feel lit up again.

So I started On Fire.

At first, it was a personal quest: to talk to the most passionate people I could find and figure out what they knew that the rest of us didn’t.

Since then, I’ve interviewed nearly 80 of the world’s most passionate people — from mythologists and mentalists to presidential historians, fingerstyle guitar legends, and pigeon rescuers.

I’ve immersed myself in the psychology of passion, dug deep into the science, and talked to top researchers to understand what really lights us up — and what keeps that fire alive over time.

That journey led me to found the Human Aliveness Lab (HAL) — a new center of gravity for the study and storytelling of passion and aliveness.

HAL is where I’m building tools, studies, and cultural frameworks — alongside top thinkers — to bring aliveness back into modern life: for individuals, teams, and the culture at large.

On Fire is where I share what I’m learning — through interviews with some of the most passionate people on the planet, the latest science on human flourishing, and raw field notes from my own path through burnout, mastery, and passionate living.

What to Expect

I write two main kinds of posts:

• Dispatches (weekly-ish)
  Short, raw reflections on the front lines of building HAL and staying alive inside modern life. Less polished. More personal. These are field notes on what it really means to live a fully alive life.

• Essays (twice a month)
  Deeper explorations into the psychology, science, and cultural significance of passion and purpose. Often rooted in interviews, research, or long-form storytelling.

💌 These posts will always be free.

Because I believe this message matters — and the only way to build a more alive world is to start by spreading the spark.

If you’re one of the early paid subscribers: thank you.

Your support doesn’t just fund research and movement-building — it gives me the emotional fuel to keep going. To keep writing. To keep believing.

And if you're considering becoming a paid subscriber… your support helps fund:

• Independent research on passion and flourishing

• Tools and experiences to help people reignite their spark

• The long-term sustainability of this mission

Either way — free or paid — I’m so grateful you’re here.

Let’s build a more alive world, together.