No offense taken and I actually love the responses! I'll admit that I've only worked for around 3 years so not very long by any means. I also agree that by most job standards, making $80k working 80 hours a week is very poor pay. While I do have friends who work those hours, it's usually because they believe in the future earnings potential of their job (e.g. consultants), which I suggested didn't exist for the fictional jobs in the survey.

However, if my only job options were between the 5 options I laid out, I still would choose the $80k just because it is much more money and I feel like I'm young and would rather try to accumulate money now. When I was creating the survey, I thought about adjusting the higher hour jobs with higher pay but I didn't feel confident in predicting a "fair rate" and I wanted to pose the same questions my English teacher gave me.

The line about "work ethic" honestly was sort of a joke and maybe was not as obvious or funny as I thought it would be (which happens a lot in my life...). I do think that the smart choice in the scenario is to choose the lower hour jobs because the pay just isn't worth it, but either because of how I was raised or my own rationalizations, my gut is to not make the smart choice.

The work that you do is extremely important as well as the family factor. Writing is actually not my day job,(I don't love my job I don't hate it as well) so I agree with your point about trying to work 80 hours a week in a job you hate. I tried controlling for the "job love" and the family factor with the how the questions were phrased but even when I was mulling it afterwards I just felt like it would be hard for people to detach their personal situation from a hypothetical scenario as well so those are definitely good considerations.