Merchant Navy After 8 Years: Regret, Depression, and What Nobody Tells You

A post on r/IndianMariners this week asked a question that most people in the industry avoid:

“Do you still advise anyone to join this field? Tbh, if I make a list of regrets, the biggest regret would be joining merchant navy and another biggest regret would be not leaving at the correct time.”

It was written by someone with over 8 years in the industry. It got 8 upvotes and 23 comments. The response from another serving mariner — someone who described himself as being in the top 5 of his batch — was this: he is still sailing as 2nd Mate while friends who joined the same batch are Chief Mates and Captains. He said he finds himself more knowledgeable than his senior officers during most contracts. And he still has moments of genuine regret.

This is the conversation the maritime industry does not want to have in public. It happens constantly in private, on ships, in WhatsApp groups, in late-night port calls. Now it happens on Reddit too.

This article is not going to tell you that it’s all worth it. It is also not going to tell you to quit. It is going to tell you what the data from serving seafarers actually shows, and what can be done about the parts that are genuinely within your control.

What the Community Is Actually Saying

The pattern in the r/IndianMariners discussion is specific. It is not random unhappiness. It clusters around three things:

Career stagnation. Officers who passed out in the same batch have diverged wildly. Some took command in 10 to 11 years. Others are still 2nd Mates or Chief Mates at year 8, 9, 10. The divergence is not primarily about competence — the original poster says the same thing. It is about the absence of distractions: the people who progressed fastest had fewer external disruptions, not necessarily better skills.

Social disconnection. The comment in the thread that stays with you: “most are on depression and many of them have cut off themselves from the group.” The WhatsApp groups that were active in the early years go quiet. People stop responding. Some disappear for months. This is not just sadness — it is the specific kind of social withdrawal that comes from years of being physically absent from every important moment in the lives of people you care about.

Paperwork and administrative load. One response from a serving officer with no regrets about the career itself expressed intense resentment about something specific: the increasing documentation burden on ships. “We do all the jobs apart from navigation,” he said. For officers who joined for the seamanship and technical work, the reality of modern shipping — where ISM paperwork, port state control preparation, and vetting audits consume enormous amounts of time — is a genuine source of daily dissatisfaction.

Why Some People Get to Command in 10 Years and Others Do Not

This is the question the original poster is really asking, and the answer matters because it has a practical component.

The path from DNS cadet to Master Mariner, or from GME cadet to Chief Engineer, is not a fixed timeline. It is a series of gates — each gate being a CoC examination level — that you pass in sequence. The gates themselves take roughly the same time for everyone: you need the sea time, you write the exam, you pass orals. The variance comes in the waiting periods between gates.

What causes those waiting periods to lengthen?

Exam failures and rewrites. Each failed attempt adds months. Orals especially — a failed oral in India typically means waiting for the next examination cycle. Officers who cleared their CoC exams without failures progressed significantly faster.

Company waiting periods between contracts. As discussed in the cadet context, some companies have 9-month waiting periods. For an officer accumulating sea time for the next CoC level, a 9-month unpaid gap is also a 9-month delay in career progression.

Family events and shore commitments. Officers who took extended leave for family events — marriages, illnesses, property disputes — lost sea time that had to be made up later. The career impact of shore leave is much higher than most people calculate when they take it.

CoC study and preparation time. Some officers underestimate the preparation required for Chief Mate and Master level exams. These are not light subjects. Officers who treated exam preparation casually failed multiple times. Officers who were systematic passed in one or two attempts and progressed.

None of this means the career is unfair. It means the variance is partially within your control and partially not.

The Mental Health Reality: What Is Actually Happening

The isolation at sea is not an exaggeration. A ship with a crew of 20 to 25 people is your entire social world for 4 to 6 months. There is no leaving. There is no calling a friend to meet for dinner. There is no switching off from the environment where you work.

Most seafarers develop functional coping strategies — exercise, books, video games, the camaraderie of a good crew. But for a meaningful percentage, especially officers in their mid-career who are experiencing the career stagnation described above, the combination of isolation plus career frustration plus disconnection from family is genuinely damaging.

The maritime mental health research that does exist — primarily from European studies, since Indian maritime mental health research is almost non-existent — documents elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and alcohol misuse among seafarers compared to shore-based populations.

In India specifically, the following factors make this worse:

There is no industry support infrastructure. The crew welfare organisations that exist internationally — ISWAN, ITF Welfare Services — have limited reach into the Indian seafarer population, particularly those sailing on Indian-flag vessels or vessels where the company does not actively promote crew welfare programmes.

Stigma is acute. In the maritime culture that many Indian seafarers operate in, admitting mental health difficulty is viewed as weakness. Officers who are struggling are far more likely to say nothing and continue sailing than to seek any form of support.

Family pressure amplifies everything. The financial model of Indian seafarer families — where the officer’s salary supports an extended family network — means that taking a break from sailing for mental health reasons carries economic consequences that are genuinely severe, not just uncomfortable.

What Is Actually Within Your Control

Listing problems without addressing what can be done is not useful. Here is what the evidence from seafarers who manage this career well actually shows:

Your CoC progression timeline is the single most important variable under your control. Treat each exam as a professional milestone and prepare accordingly. Exam failures compound in ways that are very hard to recover from at the career level. The officers who took command in 10 to 11 years treated their CoC exams with the seriousness of board exams. The officers sailing as 2nd Mates at year 8 typically have one or more failed attempts in their history.

Shore leave quality matters more than shore leave quantity. Officers who use their leave to genuinely recover — rest, time with family, physical health maintenance — return to sea in better condition than officers who use leave for extended socialising and then come back exhausted. This sounds obvious. It is not actually practised.

Company selection matters at the career level. Companies that have systematic promotion ladders, that honour their sea time certificates, and that have clear CoC exam support policies produce officers who progress faster. The extra money from a slightly higher-paying but worse-structured company is rarely worth the career delay.

Having an honest answer to “is this sustainable for me long-term” is not weakness. The post that generated this article was written by someone 8 years in. The fact that he is asking the question now — out loud, in public — is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of honest self-assessment. The officers who stay in the industry and thrive are the ones who made a genuine choice to be there. The ones who suffer most are the ones who never asked the question at the right time.

If You Are Currently Struggling Onboard

If you are reading this from a ship, in a port somewhere, and the isolation is real right now:

ISWAN operates the Seafarers Help Line at +44 20 7323 2737. It is available 24 hours, free of charge, confidential, and staffed by people trained specifically in seafarer welfare.

Your company’s crew welfare officer, if one exists, is another option. DG Shipping’s grievance cell at 9004048406 covers situations involving employer mistreatment.

And SailorGPT at sailorsuccess.online/sailorgpt is available at any hour, on satellite internet, with no registration. It is not a helpline — it is a knowledge resource and mentor. But sometimes just being able to articulate what you are dealing with to something that responds with understanding is the first step.

Conclusion

The regret documented on r/IndianMariners is real. The depression is real. The career stagnation is real for a significant subset of officers.

None of this means merchant navy is the wrong career. It means it is a specific kind of life with specific costs that are not advertised. The people who do well in it are not the ones who were never warned — they are the ones who understood what it was before they were 8 years in.

If you are considering the career: go in with full information.

If you are already in and struggling: name the problem before it names you.

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Struggling onboard or at a career crossroads? Talk to SailorGPT at sailorsuccess.online/sailorgpt — available anytime, completely confidential, built by the Sailor Success team with 120+ years of collective maritime experience. Free trial.

No registration. No sales pitch. Just an honest answer.