- "Enchiridion" of Epictetus.
- "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius (my personal favorite that I keep reading over and over).
- "Letters from a stoic" from Seneca.
It's not a lot of authors but they're pretty dense and should keep you busy for a long time.
For buddhism, it's a very vast subject, but I'd start with:
- "Siddhartha", this is a novel but will give you an overview on the buddhist system of thoughts. It's also very well written and inspiring.
- "What the Buddha Taught", also an introductory book on buddhist toughts.
- Another introductory book is "Buddhism for Beginners".
From there, and based on your interests that you will discover along the way, go into the "suttas" which are the religious texts. You may even want to go to a time before buddhism with the vedas and the Upanishads that have so much to teach us.
There are many schools of buddhism, some closer to what we'd call a religion in the west while others purely philosophical (without any emphasis on a god). Zen buddhism is yet another category, where the teaching is based almost entirely on mediation alone but it's the exception, even if in the west we often think buddhism = meditation, but it's not so.
So, as you can see, it's more a tree than a line and you'll figure it out as you go if it resonnates with you and how deep you want to go.
At 35, it's not an uncommon feeling, some call it a mid-life crisis.
The reason imo is it's an age when we start feeling our body is getting old, the feeling of "immortality" of our 20s is gone, we realize the clock is ticking.
Add to that what happens those last 2 years, the isolation, especially if you're single, and so of course it's a hard period for you.
Personally, the way I dealt with it, was through reading everything I could find about philosophy, particularly stoicism and buddhism. It helped me a lot, taught me how those feelings are unavoidable at times, how the mind create that pain and how to make it more easily manageable.
But there's no secret weapon, no magic cure, life is painful at time, and things get better by themselves as long as we don't add to it by feeling guity or thinking "it's not fair". Some realization takes time, so be patient and gentle to yourself, one day at a time.
2 years in, we don't even have the numbers of people hospitalized from covid or with covid. It's not science reportings that is dead, it's science itself.
Are you sure you are on the right side of the argument yourself?
Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.
Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
And the next time the government will want to force you to do something you disagree with, who is gonna fight it, the spineless white collars that we pretty much all have become?