We generally don't talk about downvotes... but I gotta say that it's sad that this comment was gray. Your approach to an uncomfortable feeling was to name it, and get curious. That's commendable, and you're brave to share such in public. We shouldn't be punishing that here. Curiosity, like the response of klysm, is warranted.
I've got a PhD in math and I've largely retreated from the academic pursuit. The thing that got me through my degree wasn't a drive for success or academic attainment, but love of the journey. Once I found employment, math turned dark and scary to me for quite some time, and this video was a breath of fresh air.
I hope you find a source of joy that you can apply yourself to. From such a root, you can flourish. It needn't be work, in fact, I believe that the perilous job market underlies my anxiety. My root is my chosen family, not my career. With that security, it's easier to let one's mind wander and pursue puzzles like this open problem (should they capture you). But it starts with curiosity.
Once, at a conference, John H. Conway admitted to me that he felt the very same as you for a period early in his career.
And speaking of failure: I woke up with an idea for how to approach the open problem. I hacked up some code to apply my approach to the Koch snowflake. In writing it out, I found the obvious problem with my approach (context-free punchline: spotted the division by zero before I wrote down the line of code that would have triggered it). It was fun to fail, because nothing depended on me succeeding in that effort. And spotting bugs before they're written is always satisfying.
