> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.
Agreed — people choose you because you’re shiny, and to the rest of the world it looks like a family, but watch what happens if you try to give up being shiny.
It's so so different where I live (Poland). It's still super common here to pair up in high school or university where you are basically still a bunch of nobodies and stay together through the fire and flames™ unless literal abuse is involved or the very basics of personality don't match.
Material status or ambition is almost never a factor even among couples of top performers I know. We were kind of raised to expect various big changes in life. Career interest changes, economical downturns, wars. You just... cannot rely on such things at all so it doesn't make sense to care much about that.
>You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
:( Yeah I know
>What kind of nature are you even watching
From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are. I will admit that you can intellectual insanity your way to enjoying/handling suffering, I was a Stoic for 3 years. Whatever the case, maybe I've personally experienced more of this power dynamic problem. Its literally traumatic.
If you know for a fact that your wife and friends only like your professional success and not YOU, you need to either work on that or get out of those relationships -- or at least build new, additional ones.
I suspect you are exaggerating things in your head though. How will your wife or friends even know that you are only a 75th percentile coder (or whatever your profession is) and not a 99th percentile one? They don't, and can't, and you need to do whatever work is necessary to understand that their love for you is not actually conditional on working 90 hours a week or staying up to date on "the literature".
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I'm not a doctor of any kind, so this isn't medical advice but: I've dealt with similar fear (usually I get scared of being in the bottom percentiles of whatever I'm doing rather than not being in the top, but the idea is the same), and IMO this feeling is enough to talk to a psychiatrist or therapist, because it is classic anxiety disorder thinking. If you really feel this way all the time (rather than just occasionally, which is pretty normal IMO -- our society tends to over-pathologize stuff like this) then talk therapy or an SSRI might help. Even if you don't think you are "crazy" or have any kind of disorder at all, talk therapy alone can improve your life dramatically. It has mine.
> From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are.
Even granting this premise, which I don't, the interpretation you are operating under -- all but the 1% or 10% or whatever get get crushed -- is not realistic. Folks live happy, contented lives today in community with others. Many species other than human care for the elderly or their sick and long-term disabled. Keeping with the evolutionary model why would altruism continually evolve into species without utility?
I guess, on a personal note, I hope things improve for you.
> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels
fwiw - a lot of go-getters find themselves surprised with the support and love they continue to receive from their spouse and friends when they are going through a rough patch.
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.