How to decide?

At the end of the day, people will for the most part tell you what you want to hear. If you are enthusiastic about leaving, they will support you in this and tell you about the exciting opportunities that await. If you are skeptical and nervous, they will urge caution, tell you that you can be happy where you are. At the end of the day, you can rely only on yourself to make your decision. There are no signs, or if there are signs, they are like what Sartre talked about with respect to the man who had failed at relationships again and again and decided to join the priesthood. The truth is, as Sartre says, he could have read the signs either as suggesting resignation or as urging perseverence. So you cannot rely on people or signs to help you make the decision.

Don't rely on websites either. I looked on one. It might be worth going through the various options offered and cashing this out in terms of them. The most common method is to have you list the pros and cons. My favorite is a sight that allows you to flip a quarter or use an 8 ball. And then there is the virtual I Ching, which I tried as well, a couple of times. The thing is, that you can interpret all of these either way.

In the end, the method that appealed most to me, and I would like to think it was the one I went with, involved Sartre's notion that in the end you will be what you have willed yourself to be. Ask yourself, do you want to have been nothing but an academic for your whole life. And the answer came back 'no'. I want to be a person who at least tried to experiment a little bit with his live, albeit a little late in the game. So I think I chose based on the sort of person I wanted to be, and there was nothing more magical than that.