Sometimes outcomes and achievements and work product are useful beyond just... stack ranking yourself against your peers. Seems so odd to me that this is your mentality unless you're earlier in your career.
Outside of work, yeah, everything is fine and there's nothing but the pure pursue of knowledge and joy.
I think the next big movement in tech will be ALL companies becoming tech companies. Right now there are hundreds of thousands of "small" companies with big enough budgets to pay for a CTO to modernize their stack and lead them into the 21st century.
The problem is they don't know they have this problem and so they aren't actively hiring for a CTO. You've got to go find them and insert yourself as the solution.