Won’t even pretend to have read the article, but I’ll recommend the last book to really make me existentially happy and which helped me out of a bout of depression: The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem. If you liked Gödel, Escher, Bach then I suspect you’ll enjoy it. It’s whimsical but quite deep.
Interesting, I loved the cyberiad, but it made me sad and angsty while still being fun. I believe this is true for a lot of SF, the same thing can be read as disheartening or encouraging.
