Star Wars fan Steven Jones, founder of the Seafarers Happiness Index, writes for Splash on 2025’s International Day of the Seafarer, channelling his inner Mandalorian.
On this International Day of the Seafarer, we celebrate an extraordinary tribe among us, a small, resilient band of individuals who, much like the fictional Mandalorians of Star Wars lore, live by a code that few outsiders can ever know or understand.
A sense of shared seafaring reality binds together men and women across oceans, languages, and generations, emphasising resilience, unwavering duty, and ironclad commitment to getting the job done.
“This is the Way” perfectly captures the unspoken stoic ethos guiding the world’s 1.9 million seafarers. These silent enablers of our global civilisation have not only shaped culture but continue to deliver prosperity to every corner of our world.
This is the way: The seafarer’s code
When storms rage and waves tower, when bones ache with fatigue and hearts with homesickness, seafarers stand firm. Perhaps too firm, as mental health burdens can mount swiftly and silently. Instilled in crew is the ethos that complaints cannot calm the sea. Theirs is a world of constant adaptation, taking good where found, confronting hardship head-on.
Shared endeavour passed through generations, from sail through steam, from sextant to AI. The fundamental values endure, competence remains non-negotiable, reliability expected, and the work completed without fanfare or recognition.
Behind the mask
Our world depends entirely on this small group, yet increasingly they are ignored, even erased from our cultural consciousness. Without seafarers, our global aspirations for peace, prosperity, and collective progress falter and fail.
Like the Mandalorian never revealing their face, seafarers wear an invisibility that keeps them from public awareness. Despite enabling world trade, they remain anonymous figures, identities subsumed by function.
We the industry know, the containership delivering your smartphone, the tanker fuelling your car, the bulk carrier transporting food and raw materials, all operated by individuals whose faces remain unseen, names unknown. Until something goes wrong, then suddenly the mask is lifted. We are failing to get that story across to the world outside our offices, conventions and bi-annual beanos.
This anonymity exacts a psychological toll. Living months apart from society, missing life’s milestones, seafarers develop a stoicism that both shields and isolates them, creating protectors who themselves remain all too often unprotected.
The small clan that moves the world
Seafarers traverse ports, oceans, and time zones while the world barely notices. So, we must use days of celebration to amplify their story—those who have sailed, who sail now, and who will sail tomorrow are the shapers of our collective future.
The parallel with Mandalorians is striking in their disproportionate impact. Just as those fictional warriors influence galactic events beyond their numbers, our world’s seafarers, fewer people than in many mid-sized cities, enable global commerce. This astonishing leverage and value which demands and deserves greater recognition from society.
Modern civilisation exists because these few seafarers carry the many. This vital dependence on their bravery, willingness, and skill must become our central message. Where once, we celebrated seafarers as legends, the explorers, warriors, national heroes. Today, their names go unrecognised, their exploits ignored.
Despite occasional acknowledgment as essential workers, too many suffer at the hands of rogue recruiters, facing wrongful imprisonment, or enduring abandonment without basic necessities. They tell us plainly in the Seafarers Happiness Index, we must do better.
Passing down the helmet
The seafaring community faces a challenge familiar to the fictional Mandalorians: ensuring their way of life continues. With an ageing workforce and recruitment challenges, the maritime industry must find ways to attract new generations while honouring traditions.
We need to communicate the way, our way. The discipline, the fraternity, the pride in silent service. There are few people braver, giving more to the world than seafarers. The sacrifice for anyone who stands at the bottom of the gangway, and climbs to a new life of months aboard a ship needs to be celebrated and revered.
So, as we celebrate this International Day of the Seafarer, let us recognise these modern maritime Mandalorians among us. Their duty, resilience, and quiet competence enables our way of life.
We have to find the ways to support seafarer welfare organisations, to advocate for fair treatment, to make life as rewarding for them as they do for us. We have to build pride back into the mix, to have the means of young people seeing seafarers as something to respect, revere and aspire to be.
The way of the seafarer must continue. For in their hands lies not just cargo, but the connected world as we know it. This is the way, this is the Day of the Seafarer.
