He needs some time to recover from burnout. 

We all deserve time off work outside the two-day weekend. Two days are hardly enough time to recover from the five-day workweek, but if you’ve been working day after day and day after day without a break, a two-day weekend might sound like heaven on earth. It’s not easy to work at a restaurant for six hours a day for 45 days straight, even if you’re technically working fewer hours than someone else who is working 9 hours a day at a desk. If you don’t have the opportunity to take a break of 1-4 days or more, your body will keep score, and the score won’t be good.

Employees choose companies that give generous PTO packages for a reason. Your time outside of work is valuable, and you can’t live fully if you don’t have time to yourself to recover from the burnout that can come from working all the time. Famously, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and you do not want to be screaming, «Here’s Johnny!» because you can’t take a vacation without getting fired. 

The employee in this story is on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, and he wants to prevent that. He decided to quit his job without a plan, with 8 months of savings to sustain him, because he’s so burnt out and exhausted from constantly working around the clock. He calculated how much he actually makes per 70-hour workweek, and did not like what he saw.