Hey boomers: retire, pass on the Enterprise to someone who will learn the responsibilities and have more of their prime ages to run things.

We don't need to worship the past, we don't need to keep boomer badasses going in spin offs.

We need steady episodic progress.

And when they move you up to Admiral, idk what happens but you're almost guaranteed to turn evil

gets promoted

This is like the one good character moment in the whole movie.

I REALLY hate how this potentially pivotal character moment was ignored in Picard.

I feel like much of the conflict, especially in the first season could have been avoided if he had just stayed in command. It's clear that Riker was able to go on some kind of extended sabbatical while retaining his command, I'm not sure why he chose not to do that?

I'm also I'm not sure if this was on purpose, but I feel like the three seasons of Picard was a meditation on what happens if you disregard this piece of advice from Kirk.

I had an old friend years ago who worked in a paper mill. He had been there for over 30 years in all kinds of positions and at the time he was on the verge of becoming a manager with a desk job and big responsibilities. We told him to avoid the management job and to just stick to whatever he was doing until retirement which wasn't that far away from him at the time. Management would have meant more pay, more perks, more money ... but also more responsibility and more opportunities for people to blame him if anything went wrong. Besides, he was making a ton of money in the position he had at the time. We all told him to just stay where he was and he did. He was fine, he had enough money, he had enough responsibilities and he was in a great team of people he had known all his life and he was a senior level worker that everyone looked up to anyway. Within five years of making that decision, he was diagnosed with cancer and he died shortly after. But during all that time, he was happy at work, made a fortune for his family and he got to spend his free time with his family and friends. If he had taken the management job, he would have gone through tons of stress, and probably been blamed for a dozen things and a high likelihood he would have been fired and lost his benefits. It was a company tactic to place long term workers in management positions, give them too much responsibility, and get the excuse to fire them so that the company wouldn't have to pay into an expensive retirement package. It was a high risk position.

Moral of the story is ... if you get to place in life where you get to have some measure of control and you are comfortable ... stick with it because it might not get any better than that.