Having and enforcing personal boundaries will change your life. People will respect you for it too, not turn you away.

You will not respect yourself even when your wallet is empty.

That said, it is currently reasonably easy to switch the job in our area.

That's why you (a) interview in batches, and (b) even after you have taken a shitty job that you needed _now_ you keep interviewing.

In the longer run: build up some emergency funds; and always keep interviewing as a low intensity background activity, so you have offers before you need them.

I've always felt that interviewing is a pretty high intensity activity. At least the ones I've been in, which are a parade 5-6 of interviewers asking you to do problems at a whiteboard in hour intervals. At the end of those days, I'm physically and mentally exhausted, and often hungry, as they tend to make me talk right through lunch. I really dread interviews like this.

You are right. My choice of words was confusing:

By low intensity background activity I didn't mean that interviews are easy. I meant to suggest, interview at one company every quarter (or a similar rate).

(Though interviewing does get easier with practice. I usually batch up a lot of applications to different companies when I'm about to seriously look for a new job, and when I'm properly in gear, I breeze through those full day ordeals without too much loss of sanity. After all, there are only so many different technical interviews questions in common use amongst the companies.)