This exactly. You sound very risk averse. If you're going to take a small pay cut to work 40 hours at Target paying 15$ an hour this is exactly what you should do. You're clearly being burnt out and that's likely reflecting in interviews and job searches. Just like with dating desperation isn't an attractive trait when an employer looks at you.
Bear in mind that risks are different when you have a lower salary. The risk for one person might be "have to sell some stock", for someone else it might be "homeless in a month".
Exactly. We don't even have a month of our gross income in cash savings and outside of that just my meager 401k that would even remotely be touchable (with great penalty) in a "whoops, I quit my job and it didn't pan out" scenario.