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 relations

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.