I think competitive personalities and globalization just don’t mix. When humans lived in much smaller groups it was possible to carve out a niche if you wanted

I think competitive personalities and globalization just don’t mix. When humans lived in much smaller groups it was possible to carve out a niche if you wanted to. Aside from the monarch you probably didn’t know of many other people outside your community who were really good at X/Y/Z. Now there are 8b of us and it’s not hard to find out how many of those people are really good at something. Survival in wealthier countries is also so easy that all the competition is really for prestige/glory/status (having a moderately bigger house, nicer vacation, sending your kids to a better school) anyway. The other thing is that our financial system is so well-defined it can gamify “success” as just increasing a simple, well-understood metric: money