From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg,
What you stumbled upon with Epicureanism is something which has long been
one of my pet peeves. My understanding is that the disconnect is less
between Epicureanism and Epicurus but rather Epicureanism the Hellenistic
philosophy and what we think of as Epicureanism. The disconnect is that
moderns tend to view the philosophy as one of hedonism. While this is
true–like many ancient philosophies it had pleasure as a strong
component–the contemporary association between hedonism and excess is hard
to find in ancient philosophy. Just because Epicureans looked to maximize
pleasure and minimize pain does not mean they’d be spending their time
getting wrecked at Baiae in Clodia’s pleasure grotto. To the contrary
they’d tend to write great didactic poems on lofty philosophical topics.
(The modern exemplar of this was, of course, Santayana, whose self-described
Epicurean outlook resulted in him loafing around Europe in philosophical
contemplation.) I’d argue that this is a different sort of disconnect than
Orwell-Orwellian, in that Orwellian has come to mean something on its own
and properly reflects the circumstances Orwell described in his writing.
Epicureanism in the modern sense derives from either accidental or willful
ignorance of history and philosophy, which simply makes it kind of annoying.