If I may be honest

About two or three weeks ago I discovered that my beloved car will not be my beloved car much longer. This year has been a big expenditure year for the old girl and we've already put more into her in the last three months then her current net worth, so it is time to say goodbye. The task of looking for a new car has been interesting. It started out a bit apprehensively, with me not really wanting to accept that I actually needed to find a car. That quickly turned into an interested curiosity and even a touch of excitement. After three weeks of looking for cars online that are affordable, quality and have low mileage, there are few to none in my price range. I've been grappling w/ the choice of either getting a less great car and spending less, or getting a car I know will last me a long time and will cost me about 1/3 as much per month. In some ways I feel like I can relate the car search to many other areas of my life-- finding a job, relationships, budgeting... I work and work and work and work and think and think and think and talk to everyone I can think of to get advice; I brainstorm and take notes and evaluate and question, and ask more people, and check consumer reports again and again, and bounce from one website to the other, and call people up and visit dealerships and still no answers come. I am still just as far away from making a decision as I ever was, except the difference is that today I've spent about 100 hours trying to find the right answer and have nothing to show for it, and before I just had no idea bout cars. I still have no idea if a smaller, newer compact car is worth the thousands of dollars they cost; if a 2004 Toyota Corolla or 2005 Honda Civic are really worth $12,500 each, even though they each have 90,000+ miles on them. Similarly, I am unsure if my job at a museum w/ unpredictable hours and a plethora of other frustrating elements is really worth the $10 bucks an hour I am getting paid. I still don't know if I should really give all the guys I meet a chance even though 80% of them are not attractive to me, 95% are not interested in me and the other 5% are blockheads. These are tough questions and there are no straightforward solutions. There are a million 'what ifs' and stipulations. There are no easy solutions. And, like the car search, after 100+ hours of trying to put the leg work in to find a solution, I feel as empty handed as I ever was. Somehow all of these issues just feel like the same problem/question over and over again just dressed up in different suits and striking at different parts of my heart. They are all frustrating, they are all complicated, none of them come with instruction manuals and nobody will tell me how to proceed. No matter how hard I try, or how many ppl I talk to, or how many hours I spend researching online, I feel like I'm in the same place I was last week, last month, last year or last decade. I just can't figure out the the way to go and I don't feel like I'm getting the inspiration I need to carry on. At this point do I just say 'to hell w/ it' and make a choice, or do I hold out for some inspiration and try to believe its going to come? At what point do the pieces start falling into place so I can start worrying about new problems? Or will those problems just be the same problems I'm dealing with now, only they are dressed in a pin-stripe, rather than a navy blue suit? Is this all really a test of my faith, or am I just blind?