Consider an example of a senior consultant who has never had a full day off in three years. She wakes up at 5:00 am and checks her mail even before the kettle heats, and goes to sleep with her phone on the pillow next to her. She is not driven by financial need alone; she is driven by something quieter and far more menacing: the terror that if she stops, she will disappear. Not in a physical sense, but in an existential sense. Although this is an individual portrait, it speaks to a common and mostly unaddressed psychological state that has found its way into the high-achieving culture of the present. The pursuit of excellence, long held as a virtue, has within itself its shadow, which psychology is only just beginning to clarify, to the point where identity is so completely assimilated to productivity that the self no longer exists…