"I'll know when it feels right"

Several times in the last fourteen months you've nearly been there. Around eleven at night the course has seemed obviously right, and you've gone to bed settled and relieved. By breakfast it's gone. You take this as a sign that you weren't really sure, that the decision isn't ripe yet, and that when you're truly sure the feeling will hold.

I think this belief keeps the loop going more than any other, so I'll take it slowly. Most of what follows is my reasoning, and I'll say where a study comes in.

Think about what feeling sure would need. The decision is about the future. Whether you'll like the work, whether the work will exist, and what happens at the builders' merchant if you stay are all unknown, and they'll stay unknown until they happen. However many laps you do, that doesn't change. So if feeling right means feeling that the doubt has gone, you're waiting for something the situation can't supply. A person with good judgement, in your position, would have doubts. Your doubts tell you that you've understood the situation, and they say nothing against any of the options.

Now think about the people you know who seem sure of their choices. They're glad they moved or retrained or stayed put. It's tempting to assume they felt that way beforehand and that the feeling guided them. Gilbert and Ebert's photography students, in the last chapter, suggest the order is often the other way about. The students with a final choice came to like their print more after the choice was closed. They became more confident because they'd committed. If that holds more widely, then the settled feeling you're waiting for comes from choosing, and you can't have it first.

That also explains the eleven o'clock feeling and why it goes by morning. For an hour you'd chosen, in your head, and you felt the relief of having chosen. By morning nothing had been done about it. You hadn't filled in a form or told anyone, so the question was open again, and because it was open you started comparing again. The feeling probably wasn't wrong. You'd just done nothing to fix it in place.

There's an objection here, and it's a fair one. Sometimes a bad feeling about an option is telling you something. If every time you picture moving firms your stomach drops, that's worth attention, even if you can't explain it. I agree.

A feeling that's steady and attaches to one option over weeks counts as evidence. A feeling that visits every option in turn, as yours does, is something else. When Course leads you worry about money, and when Stay leads you worry about wasting your life. Whichever option is ahead gets the doubt. A doubt that follows whichever option is ahead is about choosing, and it tells you nothing about the options themselves.

So I'd change what you ask of yourself. "Do I feel sure?" is the wrong question, because you won't. A better one is whether the option does what you need it to do, and whether you can live with its known drawbacks. You can answer that on an ordinary Sunday with the doubt still there.