Should I quit my job?

You have been carrying this one into work every day for a while now, and you have probably already had the conversation in your head on the drive home, where it always goes better.

We are not going to tell you to leave, and we are not going to tell you to stay. That decision has your rent in it, and your people, and things about your life that no page could know. What we can do is help you find out what is actually wrong, because should I quit is often the last question in a stack of unasked ones.

What the reading is really for

Three cards: what is pulling you toward the door, what is true about where you are now, and what would give you a clearer view. Read it as a way of laying out the decision rather than making it.

It helps to notice which card you want to argue with. That is usually the one doing the work.

What we cannot see from here

A card cannot see whether the job market will be kind to you next quarter, and it cannot see whether the new place would be better. Anyone who tells you a spread can weigh two salaries is having you on.

There is a harder honesty here too. Sometimes the reading points at something that would follow you: a way of taking on too much, a discomfort with being average at something new, a habit of leaving at the first sign of being ordinary. Sometimes it points squarely at a workplace that is grinding somebody down. Both happen, and the difference matters, and only you have enough detail to tell.

What usually turns up

The most common finding is that the decision has already been made and is waiting for permission. People describe months of drafting a resignation letter in their head, and then are surprised when the cards land on something about a threshold.

The second most common is the opposite: the job is fine and one relationship in it is not, and the whole building has been repainted by one person. That is worth separating before anybody hands in anything.

The Eight of Cups page is the honest one about walking away from something you built, including the part where you look back. If money is the thing holding the decision still, the money reading is a better use of the next ten minutes than another draw about the job.

The three questions underneath

Most of the time this is really one of three questions, and separating them changes what you do next.

Is the work wrong, or is the place wrong? A job you would love at a different company is a much smaller problem than a field you have finished with, and on a bad week the two feel identical.

Is it the job, or is it the load? Small children, an ill parent, a house move and a hard year will make almost any job unbearable, and leaving will not give back the hours that took.

And is it the job, or is it the position you have been put in? Being underpaid, overlooked, or managed by somebody unkind produces a very particular tiredness, and it sometimes responds to a conversation, though not always, and you are allowed to have already tried.

What to do before you decide anything

Gather one piece of real information. Talk to somebody who left, or find out what the notice period actually is, or look properly at what three months of savings would cover. Decisions made in the dark feel enormous, and most of the size is the dark.

Whatever you choose, you are allowed to have found this hard for longer than it looked from outside.