Should I leave this job

The essay follows one invented person. She has an offer from a firm in another city, an answer is due on the 12th, and her mother lives alone. In the fortnight before she books anything she puts the same question five ways.

First, before the offer arrives: will I get it? That question is about a decision other people are making in a room she is not in. Worse, an answer either way tends to make a person ease off or stop trying: a forecast reduces your own effort whichever way it points.

Second, with her father's hope sitting inside it: is there government service in my chart? This asks for an identity so that no choosing will be needed. The old texts do keep a chapter on work. Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka gives its 10th chapter to karmajiva, the earning of a living, and spends it naming kinds of work. That answers what sort of work suits a person. It cannot answer whether to resign in March.

Third: is this a good year for me to make a change? There is no verb of hers in it. A year cannot be good on its own, only good for doing something particular, and the particular thing has been left out. Its real attraction is the sentence it supplies later: it was not the right year.

Fourth, at two in the morning: something has been sitting on my work since 2019, which planet is it? Once there is a cause, the hour belongs to the cause instead of to the decision, and a named cause has a market standing behind it.

The fifth is the one she actually typed into the booking form: two options, a date, and the cost written on both sides. What is still missing are the constraints, the facts that will not move for anybody: the notice period, the loan instalment, a work permit tied to one employer, a parent living alone. Those settle most working lives, none of them are in the chart, and if nobody in the room asks for them the hour is decoration.