We need to be more careful in our language, the word depression has become overused, much like the drugs used to treat it.
The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit.
So I take antidepressants not to fix the issues, but to alleviate the symptoms so that I am able to take on the actual problems.
Could it possibly be that our idea of an "awesome life" is mistaken?
Why is that a problem, if you're not a Luddite or Puritan?
If someone truly feels and believes they have a "wonderful" life, it would seem they are not suffering from crippling depression.
Though what I think you're trying to say is there are people who are depressed even though they seem to have all of their basic human needs being met.
An analogy I make sometimes is this. Have you ever been scared while watching a scary movie, or laughed at a comedy or teared up at a fictional drama? Even though your intellect knows the thing you are watching is an artificial event that never really happened, your emotional state and your physical state don't care what your intellectual understanding is.
Some forms of depression are medical, people need to be aware of this. Thinking that everyone can be cured by running off and finding one's true self is incredibly dangerous. For some people, that is the solution, but for others, running away from their support network is the exact wrong thing to do.
All that said, soul crushing jobs are soul crushing. The modern world's insistence that we all have true purpose in life has not helped things any. A lot of people used to just be happy getting married, having kids, and seeing their kids do well. Now, we all want some sort of higher purpose (I'm guilty of this as well), which makes obtaining happiness really hard.
For the longest time, success was "at least a few of your kids survived". Since then, standards have been raised to a point that only a fraction of the population can meet the current bar.
P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? Listening to your needs I suspect might look like asking someone for help, or something along those lines. But that's just it, everyone's needs aren't the same.
The article, and popular mythos.
Leaving one's job, running off to explore one's true self. Society is full of stories of people fed up with everything so they leave behind all they know.
Heck sometimes it even works. But I'm countering the article's main thesis, which seems to be "depression is from having a crappy job" with the point that there are other causes as well.
Maybe having all those things actually isn't what leads people to feel grateful for being alive.
Consider it like this: most qualities in humans fall into some sort of normal distribution. Some 1% of the population are the 1% with the least natural serotonin production. Genetics play a large role in that. Could that cause of depression not exist?
Now for the critique, the OP didn't really make it clear who's idea of a wonderful life it is. I also use the word secrect as a way to throw some shade, because the word secret implies the owners knowledge of the secret, which is not alway the case here, I should have just said "... has a secret."