I'll bite with my experience and I hope it helps somebody
I Was in the same boat, well not quite. A month ago I made a thread asking why public is so valued and got chewed out severely (it's at -9 now lol)
I hated Public accounting and I knew I would on my very first day. We went into a windowless room and everybody just sat there for hours in silence typing. Also, not big 4 but national. People kept saying to stick it out but I ignored it. The amount of people who truly hate public and instead of leaving it just stay and bitch is too high, both here and in real life. I couldn't take it and I don't understand why people are so stupid to stay in a position that makes them unhappy all for money. I understand people work in public to have a better life afterwards but I didn't feel it was worth it. Everyday people would always complain about how busy they were and stay until late hours. Instead of getting angry I always laughed at working past 12AM because it was for work that nobody cares about, yet it needed to be done. I Volunteered for a project only to be thrown under the bus by a partner, luckily I had an email on file that saved me and their reaction was "huh". Never heard about anything from it again, no sorry no nothing just a simple "huh"
I decided to just interview when I could during busy season for literally any job; I had "appointments" throughout and actually got an offer as a staff accountant and start in a couple of days. Luckily it's in an industry (restaurant group) I love and the controller was hilarious, they also despised public so I was able to tell the truth and not lie about anything (still had to be professional).
One of the main reasons I left is I felt like public doesn't really provide as much of a learning experience as people said it did, at least for me. You get thrown into an industry you could care less about and are forced to do boring work. It's depressing when you realize the work doesn't matter so why is so much effort being placed into it? Or that's how I felt about it at least. Office politics are the worst and it's annoying how managers don't really act like managers or team players at all ( or at least mine didn't)
I don't know why so many people here are so concerned about getting laid off especially with B4 experience AND a CPA. I have neither and was able to get in industry job a lot faster than I (and many others) expected. I am very eager to start my career over in industry and work with the new team (free food everyday is amazing) and the training is supposedly great.
Stop staying in public if it's not making you happy. Worst case scanerio you just go back to public. Find something you WANT to do and use your experience to your advantage. I have a feeling this will be downvoted to hell and back but that saying YMMV is kinda true. Some people just aren't fit for public. Instead of going everyday and making yourself miserable why not fix it and apply to other places that might make you happy?
Now I shat on public but there were definitely some things that I learned from it/can see enjoyable. One is the obvious resume booster. There are many people who do not have public experience nor their CPA. Both are a huge help to have, even taking the tests can probably get you somewhere
Another important thing public helps with (and I hated it so much but it definitely was effective) is throwing you into the wolves starting out. I learned a lot by this but at the same time I personally think this is not how people should be trained, at all. Unfortunately I have no solution to this but to put your head down and try to get things to make sense.
Anyway that's my rant. Public sucks but it's not like it just takes advantage of you and leaves you with nothing in the end. If it's truly making you miserable just leave, it's that simple especially if you don't have kids or a family
Stop relying on one job to make/break your career as that mindset will make you unhappy