A bad life is easy to leave. The evidence is everywhere, and eventually it accumulates past the point of argument. What is genuinely difficult is leaving a life that works, one you could describe to any reasonable person and have them tell you to stay.
The trap is that every individual reason for staying is true. The work is meaningful. The people are good. The money resolves problems that used to keep you awake. None of that is illusion, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. The problem is that a list of true reasons does not add up to a life that is yours.
This is where most people get stuck for years. They keep auditing the reasons, hoping to find one that is false, because a false reason would make leaving legible to everyone else. But that is not how it resolves. It resolves when you stop requiring the decision to be justifiable in those terms.
Which is not permission to be reckless. It is the opposite. The alternative has to be built before it can be walked into, and building it while still inside the old life is slower and less romantic than the story usually goes. But it is the only version that holds.