Build a blog in Laravel with post categories and user preferences

I'm building a blog for fun. In my blog, I have users, posts, and a fixed list of predefined categories.

1) Posts belong to many categories. 2) Users can specify category preferences, and therefore belong to many categories.

I have this set up as a series of many-to-many relationships:

In User.php:

/**
* A user belongs to many categories
*/
public function categoryPreferences()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('App\Category');
}

In Post.php:

/**
* A Post Can Have Many Likes
*
* @return \Illuminiate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\belongsToMany
*/

public function categories()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Category');
}

And the inverse of each in Category.php:

/**
* A category belongs to many users
*/
public function users()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\User');
}

/**
* A category belongs to many posts.
*
* @return \Illuminiate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\belongsToMany
*/

public function posts()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Post');
}

I have corresponding category_post and category_user join tables to support each relationship. However, I may be thinking about this incorrectly.

I would like to display a loop of posts that belong to categories that users have specified, but can't work through how to do that. I can easily collect a user's category preferences with:

$categories = $user->categoryPreferences->pluck('id');

And can do the same for posts:

$categories = $post->categories->pluck('id')

However, I'm unsure how to merge the two collections together. I've looked into polymorphism, but that doesn't seem quite right. Can someone point me toward the correct concept?

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