I was often told I wouldn't live to see 20, and at some point began internalizing it, and thus living as such. It's unbreakable now. Every hour I work I think of friends who are no longer here, and the last thing I want to think of as I die is 'I should have taken more time for myself'. It seems like absolute madness that we give away so much of our lives when tomorrow is not a given. And if we take the dollar earned per hour worked of life, we learn that those with money and who earn more have lives with more 'value'.
Fuck that.
Do you, the rat race isn't for all of us, and maybe you will find a path to happiness somewhere out there. Success is not objective, you don't have to hold yourself to a broken society's standards.
I know that it is kind of taboo to question mental health here but never the less, I'm going to recommend that you see if you can find a professional to talk to. Someone who is trained and can actually help rather than some random person (like me) on the internet.
Talking with a professional helped my daughter when she was in a dark place and I hope maybe it could help you as well.
By the way, the work you do is fucking awesome, just so you know. At least, it matters to me.
Theoretically another person in my life would be good, but in practice i prefer being alone with my math books.
If you are still more interested in a self-reflection approach I would read about something like the theory of positive disintegration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration
Still, I would stress that the act of naming problems out loud to a person putting their attention on you, even like in a group talk therapy setting or something, is not a no-op
Also, with your skills, you may just be able to find somewhere where they give you a long leash so that you can work w/ your math books in a mostly self-directed fashion. I agree that the job search can be hard, though..
If you are good at getting inanimate objects ("computers") to do something useful, and you still enjoy it, then do that. Turn off the comments. Turn off the bug reports. Torvards said, "Real men don't back up. They upload on ftp and let the world mirror it."
Dealing with people can be a pain in the ass. So don't.
Find other things to do to provide some balance. Cooking. Sailing. Gardening. Nand2tetris. Whatever!
My bottom line: the universe is fascinating and awesome. What's it all about? So, I do physics.
Sadly our leaders, the John Baez and Scott Aronson and people like that, prefer to think in Euler notation and WordPress posts. As Kurt Vonnegut said: So it goes.
The world of representation of difficult concepts using interactive 3D and elegant code is still in its infancy. You are not yet at the ground floor of the construction of a future elegant structure. You - and a few others - are in at the second basement.
Fortunately, the only way out is to look up!