>>11187129It depends a LOT on your personality, so there is no universal answer. I personally don't care about whether or not someone else was or wasn't able to solve something. Honestly, the only thing I care about is "doing" math, that's it. With luck and patience you will get results, some bigger, some smaller (in your own gauge). As to the process of choosing problems, I like easy to formulate but totally uncanonically to takle stuff. Not gonna doxx myself, so let's say write down an easy looking geometrical pde and figuring out that saying anything about it's solution/eigenvalues/whatever needs lots of funky constructions.
There are however many people who work with a totally different mindset. Unfortunately pretty common is that many very talented (as in technically well versed and broad knowledge) young mathematicians try to tackle killer-problems which are long known, and killer refers to their career. An other common, and much more successful, archetype is working on problems introduced by other people in "hip" areas (think right now geometric flows, higher structures in physics (pls don't do that), stochastic geometry etc.), but carefully choosing them based on how realistically they are solvable and publishable. This is in a way a nice talent on its own.
And then there's the insane ones. Pretty rare, in most cases without success in modern academia, if lucky are being picked up by a more "normie" Prof. and put to good use. Mostly unironic proper autists with great mathematical ability. I have no clue what goes on in their head and with their precise thinking process though, seemed like a fucking random number generator in all cases I've known so far.
In all cases it is only soulcrushing if you are not aware of the fact that in 95% of your tries, stuff will not work out, period.
