It's all about the price your skills command on the market. NOt how much exertion or time you expend.
That's exactly the real key right there. The world will pay you what it thinks you're worth. That does not correlate to actual production work in terms of physical labor, mental effort, or time spent. The proper evolution of payment-driven thinking should go like this:
1. Work harder
2. Work smarter, not harder
3. Pick the job that pays ridiculously well, which doesn't necessarily correlate to a long workweek or mental/physical effort because that's simply not how the economy really, actually functions
The American way is to get out there & work hard. The Asian way is the "go to school to get good grades to become doctor" meme. The
actual marketplace way is to find jobs that pay really well without necessarily needing to be a skilled craftsman, a hard laborer, a PhD, etc. - being a manager, for example. The management of labor has historically been where the "easy" money is - you hire the skilled labor, which does all the work, while having
just enough knowledge to direct it. And the money gets better the higher up the ladder...the top-paid CEO's typically get between $20 to $100 million annually and they get to fly around on jets and play golf a lot.
The thing to keep in mind is that money isn't everything, unless that
is everything for your personal goals. Like, I make a pretty decent living working in freelance IT in general hardware & software, but I could easily make twice as much if I gave it up & settled into another IT-related job, but loving what I do is a really big factor for job happiness for me, in addition to having enough to live on & enough to buy a few toys here & there, and this job brings me a great deal of satisfaction while also letting me get stuff like a Nintendo here & there.
I basically get paid to play with computer toys & set them up perfectly for different people & companies, which is an awful lot of fun for me. I also get to travel around my state, so it's new projects, new people, and new places on a regular basis. Even though I wouldn't consider myself rich, I am comfortable & I get to do something that I really enjoy doing, and I consider myself extremely fortunate for being in that position because I've had a lot of crappy jobs in the past that did NOT pay well and were
not enjoyable, haha. And I know that there are a lot of people who feel stuck in similar positions & aren't necessarily able to extract themselves from those situations for a variety of reasons.
But looping back to the OP, yup, the higher up the food chain you go, the more money you make & the less you have to hustle. My various crappy minimum-wage jobs back in college were often very stressful & required a lot of work for virtually no money. At one point I had three jobs...it was highly motivating to finish college & get my degree so that I could graduate to a better working environment, haha. Now I have actual free time & I'm not just scraping by financially. So yeah, the phenomenon that you're experiencing is real, and we are fortunate to have it because a lot of people out there aren't so lucky.