Ambivalence

I subscribe to a blog written by a female computer science professor, See Jane Compute. She captured some of my feelings related to my workplace in a post about her own.

"The "problem", if you can call it that, is that I don't overwhelmingly hate my job. If I did, the decision would be easy. There are certainly days that I hate my job and fantasize about resigning, where the despair is so deep that I can't see my way out of it. But there are things that I love about my job, too, and days where I do literally pinch myself and dance around my office (with my door closed, of course) because I love my job so much.

There are a few central questions that I find myself coming back to again and again:

1. Do the bad days outweigh the good days, and by how much?
2. How much of the love/hate has to do with the institution/department, and how much with the general parameters of a job as "assistant professor"?
3. Would things really be better somewhere else, or would I feel this way pretty much anywhere? (In other words, do the majority of the problems come from individual institutions or the culture of the field?)"

I am not sure if I find it comforting that someone else in academia regularly goes through this process of reflection about leaving but it does speak to a frustration with traditional bureaucratic structures that come along with the academic environment. My own decision making process continues.