Why do people say from Associate up its more chill?

Because an analysts job is to cram 10 lbs of shit in a 5 lb bag, wherein the shit is tasks and the bag is your time

When you don’t need to do that, it’s “chiller” in the sense that your tasks are not due every day but a longer time horizon. People trust you to get it done , and when you can execute, it can be very chill

Really not that hard to build a model and assign CIM slides to ur analysts bro lmao

Good analysts can sometimes end up as mid-bucket, stressed out associates because they spent their analyst years grinding stuff out and getting 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag by eating half of it. That's fine but it doesn't teach you anything about scheduling / management / workflow optimization, which is your job as an associate.

If you have a bunch of work that needs to be done, you need to start with "what all can the interns on this team do?" and work your way up the ladder until you're left with yourself as the last "analyst". That should leave you with some spare capacity with which to help juniors on any work that's a little bit beyond them, check work, deal with emergencies, and preferably figure out what the VPs are so busy with and take some of that off their plate. There should be some slack in the system in case something goes wrong.

In my humble opinion, it gets more chill as you get up for a variety of factors (and as others have stated gets more stressful in different ways)

How it gets more chilled:

Hours expected in office are less

Grunt work and boring stuff expected to do are less

Generally those who made it higher in the firm are better at the job so it’s some survivorship bais. Hard to coast from analyst all the way up to MD. The kids who made it to MD were probably good at the job. Naturally if you are good at something, doing it can be chill relatively speaking. 

More rewarding equals more chill. It helps keeping things chill when you take home $1mm a year. Eat good food. Have a nice wife. Nice home. Clothes. Vacations etc. that stuff helps make life easier. 
 

If you genuinely find the job of investment banking fun and enjoyable then the more senior you are the more you are actually “investment banking” as opposed to just helping those senior folks who are the “real” investment bankers. That feeling can produce feelings of chill ness too as it’s like you made your goal and are helping the clients and feel the satisfaction that you are having a real positive impact in the world  

The flip side of all of these is how it gets more stressful. As much good as you can do and as much you can get paid is as much bad you can do and as much as you can lose

Gotta find what works for you. 

Good luck