You've written the resignation email in your head at least four times. Once in the shower. Once during a meeting about a meeting. Once at 11:40 on a Tuesday night when you should have been asleep. You have not written the real one.
You have, at some point this month, typed "signs it's time to quit your job" into a search bar.
And the internet handed you a list. No room to grow. A boss who makes your teeth hurt. You dread Monday. You're underpaid. You read it, counted your boxes, and felt nothing, because you already knew all of that. You checked the same boxes last year.
Why the list can't answer the question
Those lists treat your job like a patient and ask you to diagnose it. Count the symptoms, read the result. The problem is that the person holding the clipboard isn't neutral. You've been inside long enough for the place to change how you read it.
The longer you stay, the harder it can become to separate what you actually want from what you've learned to accept. Your schedule, your financial obligations, even your sense of who you are can become organized around the job. Eventually, leaving stops looking like a decision and starts looking like something other people get to do. When the job holds that much of your life and the door is open anyway, Corporate Inmate® calls it Corporate Captivity.
The consequence is specific. You can't weigh leaving if you can't picture it. And when the picture won't load, it's easy to read that as an answer: guess I'm staying. That isn't an answer. It can be the condition talking.
Staying feels neutral. It isn't.
There's a good experiment on this. Economist Steven Levitt had people who were genuinely torn about a big decision (quit the job, end the relationship, move) flip a coin on a website. Heads meant make the change. Tails meant stay put. Nobody had to obey the coin, but the coin moved people. The ones told to change were more likely to change, and six months later they reported being happier than the ones told to stay. Levitt's reading was that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.
Some honest limits. Those were self-reported feelings from volunteers who were already on the fence, and nobody is telling you to flip a coin about your job. The useful part is smaller and more annoying: the default has a lot of friction working for it, and it almost never gets counted as a decision. Staying feels like the absence of a choice. It's a choice with a price, and usually it's made by default.
Three questions for deciding whether to stay or leave (none of them about your boss)
Can you picture a Tuesday on the other side? Not a fantasy. An ordinary Tuesday in a different version of your life: what time you wake up, what you work on, who you talk to. If you can't get past the first hour, that can be a sign Captivity is doing some of the thinking, and the work is on the picture before the decision. Write the Tuesday down. Boring is fine. Specific is the point.
What is this job buying you, and when does that end? Money, a skill, a title, equity, a reference, runway. Name it. Check whether it's actually arriving. Put a date on it. If the honest answer is money you can't afford to walk away from yet, get the real number, because a vague fear is harder to plan around than a figure. The longer version of this question lives in Putting Your Life on Hold for Work.
Where is it showing up in the hours that aren't work? Look at your evenings and weekends. If the hours that are supposed to be yours keep getting spent recovering, the job is costing more than its schedule says. That's Coping Hours, and it's evidence you can use.
Stay, build, or leave
The lists give you two options. There are three.
Stay on purpose. This is a legitimate answer. Staying works when you can name what it's buying and roughly when it ends. That's a trade. Staying with no reason and no date isn't a trade, it's drift, and drift is how people end up in year nine wondering who approved this. If you stay, keep a life going outside the job. Taking back the hours that belong to you is part of becoming a Corporate Parolee™.
Build. You can build options while you're still inside: a runway, a skill that travels, something of your own, people who'd pick up if you called. Building isn't quitting in slow motion, and it isn't a consolation prize for someone too scared to resign. It changes the decision. Leaving looks like a leap when there's nothing under you. It looks like a move when there's a floor.
Leave. Sometimes the answer is leave, and it can be right without the job being unbearable. Plan it like you'd plan anything you intend to survive. Know what you need to live, what you have saved, what happens to your benefits, and how long you can afford to be without a paycheck. Then decide what leaving actually requires: a next move, or at least a direction, and a date.
If you're dealing with suspected discrimination, harassment, retaliation, unpaid wages, or unsafe working conditions, get qualified advice before making a move. Leaving can affect your options, and you shouldn't have to guess your way through the legal consequences.
You've drafted the resignation email a dozen times and never once drafted the other one: the email that says you're staying, what for, and until when.
Try writing that one. If it comes easily, you may be exactly where you should be. If it doesn't, that's the useful part.