Evidently I am still considering this question. Tonight at the football game, which was hard fought, I was noticing how much it resembled work at the university. You struggle and struggle to open a space for yourself in which to work. You are paid to get your ball across that line but they have people ready to tackle you at every turn. I know you have to struggle to get into school, to get degrees, to get jobs, to get tenure, to get promoted, and to work without materials, but I did not expect to struggle for the right to just do the everyday parts of a job.
I gave up nothing, I say in some moments. At other times I feel that I gave up something really fundamental, the right to grow intellectually. It seems odd to have traded that for a position where one’s charge is precisely to grow. I look for instructions on how to work, in hopes of discovering there is something I can do about this. In this culture I am not convinced there is. I remember the words of a colleague who visited years ago now: “You are putting in every shred of effort you can, running as fast as anyone, because this is required just to keep your head above water. It is a true shame.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
We can take this comparison a bit further. It’s hard to get very far without people blocking for you. Mentors and letter-writers as offensive linemen.
Then it’s the lack of these, or the inability of these to turn the such a strong tide, that is the problem in this job. So it is not just me. (So what of academic advice? How dare people say their advice solves things and that you just have to get it right, control your time right, etc.?)
And — I did renounce the ability to visit home. I would like that so much, and I did not realize I was renouncing the ability to visit. So the question is: would you go into exile just for a job or career (not for something nearer and dearer, like a specific project or a principle)?
That depends so much on circumstances. The main reason, I realized much later, that I was so willing to go anywhere was that it would get me away from my mother, who was toxic, with an excuse/reason that she would accept (because she loved the idea of my-daughter-the-professor). And that was a good and valid reason in its day, and I thought the exile was worth it. I went years without going back to home state. Now I go more often, though not to my home town but other areas, and I wish I could spend more time there, and I don’t know . . . if I had to renounce it entirely, now, I don’t know that I could, but there was a time when I would have.
I left home for college, and my family moved away after I finished graduate school, so it is the town and landscape and even soil composition I miss. Only I like the town in the family, so it is mine. I was distracted for years but I miss it. Want to visit, cannot afford. Think that with a middle class job and no responsibilities I should be able to come up with that. Am over entitled, too interested in fun, not enough interested in renunciation, I guess! 🙂