It took me over 15 years until I started to willingly use RegExp, but now I can't live without it. It's like the curse of knowledge, once you learn something you'll loose all empathy and assume everyone else knows it too. It still surprises me though, I've had bug like my regex matching terminal color sequences messing up the data if it was colored.
It feels like something that was more discovered than invented, something that would exist even if nobody knew of its existence. I get the same feeling when listening to Pharrell Williams' Happy.
It's almost like nature, many simple rules coming together to make extremely clever and fairly complex ideas