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@evan Epicurus was easily the philosopher with the biggest quality of life impact from school. I was never going to be the best at anything, but suddenly I was able to be satisfied with what I had. My academic fall from grace was inevitable, but it didn't destroy my sense of self worth, largely because my ideas of what was important in life shifted to relationships and simple pleasures.
Years later, as work started to feel just as fruitless a pursuit as academia, the #IWW and #antiwork notion that we all deserve lives that support "leisure and the pursuit of the finer things in life" seemed Epicurean at their core. What good is toil if it doesn't allow you to enjoy yourself from time to time? To idle away an afternoon in a scene plucked from Wind in the Willows: you and a close friend on a lazy bike ride to a picnic spot on a river bank where you can sit and enjoy a good, simple spread, perhaps a line in the water or a kite in the sky, just watching the world move around you as you engage in pleasant conversation...
Edited a bit as I initially typed up this response at 3:00 am on my phone before promptly falling back asleep.
@evan Come to think of it, most of the books I enjoyed reading growing up featured heavily #Epicurean characters. Bilbo and the hobbits, and the denizens of Red Wall Abbey all fought to protect their comfortable lives full of simple pleasures from the scourges of vermin and middle earth... as much as it seems rather problematic looking back (Red Wall famously had the view that a Stoat was a Stoat, and could never be trusted). Wind in the Willows though seems a much stronger parallel to the struggles of a modern epicurean, where the biggest problems were the twin threats of "progress" and that rich asshole of the neighborhood as represented by Toad and his non-stop consumerism.
