it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives
That is pretty much the theme of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, written many a moon before War and Peace. You have a king who cycles through everything he thinks he could possibly desire, attaining all of it, and realizes at the end the answer to the problem of life was... well, I'll let you figure out the rest:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
Love this! I too got the sense of growing through phases via fiction. And your comment is surprisingly similar to what I said about War and Peace recently here! https://kite.link/Fiction
This is not to disdain projects or causes. The older I get, the more I realize that life is a continually evolving question, and the task of living philosophically is partially about living comfortably with the ambiguity that that implies.