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The best thing that ever "happened" to me: as a junior in high school, my English / literature teacher, a young woman from NYC, asked if anyone might be interested in a summer course in Romanticism ast a college or university. That led to a six-week Romanticism course at St Olaf college in Northfield, MN.

That was the last time I spent any real time in the liberal arts until much later in life. 

I continued to with mostly science  / math course in my senior year in high school and then the same thing at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD, where I had a double major in chemistry and biology. It turns out that a double major is easier than a single major. One doesn't have to be as smart. LOL.

After that medical school, the USAF, and military medicine for the next 30 years. 

During the last seven years of my Air Force career I had significant issues with memories of "love" -- "romantic and physical love." To deal with those memories, I had to subjugate them any way I could and that was mostly through reading. We were living in San Antonio at the time, and it was by the swimming pool in the apartment complex where I read incessantly. I started with the oldest stuff I could remember, and Ovid's Metamorphosis. 

From there I worked forward and unbeknownst to me at the time put together an incredible and eclectic reading program. I pretty much stopped, chronologically, wiht Earnest Hemingway. Some exceptions, most notably, perhaps, Hunter S Thompson.

Late in my career, while at Langley AFB, VA, getting ready to move to San Antonio, was particularly difficult for me. Severely, severely depressed. I was saved, perhaps because of my family, but just as much because I read and re-read and re-read Hunter S Thompson. Long story. 

After retirement, started reading again, but unfortunately in 2007 I started blogging about the shale oil revolution in North Dakota and started reading less and less. 

But I never gave it up completely and in retirement my life revolved around my grandchildren. But after my grandchildren my interests and time devoted:
blogging: 60% (maybe more)
reading: 30%
investing: 10%.  A lot of time that is attributed to "investing" was in fact done while blogging and while reading. 

So, if I lived and breathed investing, physically it was blogging (80%) and reading (20%). I kept trying to improve those percentages in favor of reading but it was very difficult.