Time & Perspective Quote by W. Richard Stevens

Aviation here isn’t just a career path; it’s a rigged social system masquerading as merit. Stevens compresses a whole 1970s reality into an offhand parenthetical: “airline jobs were impossible to get.” That single clause quietly invokes oil-shock economics, industry contraction, and the bottlenecked pipeline of pilots waiting for seats that weren’t opening. It’s not melodrama, it’s arithmetic. Timing, not talent, decides your odds.

Then comes the sharper turn: “who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?” The line lands because it pretends to be a casual preference while delivering a moral verdict. Seniority isn’t just a scheduling policy in his framing; it’s a worldview, one that reduces competence to calendar years and treats ambition as a nuisance. Stevens, a scientist by profession, signals allegiance to a different religion: progress, evidence, the idea that skill should move the needle. The rhetorical question isn’t seeking agreement so much as recruiting the reader into a shared disdain for bureaucratic inertia.

The real subtext is identity management. “I decided” is a tidy narrative stitch over what was likely a messy reckoning: the fear of stagnation, the humiliation of waiting, the suspicion that the cockpit had become an assembly line. Grad school appears as both escape hatch and upgrade, a pivot into a culture where evaluation (ideally) tracks performance and ideas rather than pecking order. It’s the memoirist’s version of a lab report: conditions observed, hypothesis formed, course corrected.