Steven Jones, the founder of the Seafarers Happiness Index, on the tech above all generation and the urgent need to rebuild seamanship and trust at sea. The worst things you can lose at sea are stability, power, and position. Lose your stability and over you go. Lose power and the wind, waves, and current take you. Lose position and you’re navigating blind, vulnerable to grounding, collision, or worse. There is something else you can lose, though, something harder to detect and potentially even more dangerous: that is the trust and respect between crewmembers. When senior officers no longer trust their juniors’ competence, when professional respect erodes between watch-keepers, the entire human infrastructure that keeps a vessel safe begins to fracture. Unlike a power failure or GNSS outage, there is no alarm that sounds when this happens. The latest Seafarers Happiness Index has revealed precisely this crisis, worryingly and quietly unfolding. According to the latest responses, it seems senior officers are increasingly expressing unease about their junior colleagues’ fundamental navigational skills, a concern thrown into sharp relief by the rising threat of GNSS jamming and spoofing. What emerges is a portrait of a watchkeeper increasingly dependent on their equipment, yet dangerously unprepared if that technology fails or deceives. The tech above all generation Seafarers express concern about those who are drawn in and lulled into a false sense of security, where technology becomes not just a tool but a substitute for seamanship. The phrase that captures this perfectly: a reluctance to “even look out of the window.” This isn’t merely about preference; it represents a fundamental shift in how navigation is conceived. There is much discussion in the industry about the training mix and the complex role of traditional skills like celestial navigation, dead reckoning, and the intuitive reading of sea conditions. These skills are deteriorating, replaced by an unwavering faith in screens and algorithms. The consequences become existential when GNSS reliability is questioned. In an environment where positioning systems are jammed or spoofed, increasingly common in conflict zones and contested waters, officers without foundational navigational skills experience a “complete loss of confidence.” It is not simply that they lack alternative methods; it’s that they’ve never developed the problem-solving framework for operating without technological certainty. “My junior watchkeepers stare at screens, decisions paralysed if they cannot compute what they are being fed”. The human cost of skill erosion This technical dependency creates a cascade of problems that extend far beyond navigation itself. When confidence in competence is lost, the entire social architecture of shipboard operations begins to fracture. Trust, the foundation of effective watch-keeping and emergency response, erodes. With devastating consequences. This leaves Senior officers compelled to double-check work they should be able to delegate, leading to fatigue and resentment. Junior officers, sensing this mistrust, may become defensive or further retreat into technology’s false comfort. The divide deepens. Those who learned their craft primarily through traditional methods struggle to understand how their juniors can be so skilled and knowledgeable in many ways, and yet so helpless if there is a blip. Meanwhile, junior officers perceive such concerns as “technophobia” or resistance