Firefly and the Importance of Work
The moral case for working towards a goal and getting other people to help you.
People like doing things... it’s a whole thing.
Most people don’t spend a lot of time just sitting still and being quiet. Unless you’re a Buddhist monk or trying to achieve perfect stillness of some kind, you are going to want to do something rather than nothing. Either you’re going to start thinking about things or looking around at your surroundings. If or when that fails to be something worth doing, you will likely try to find something else. Playing with the chair you’re sitting in or finding something to pick up and use in some way.
Even this will start to bother you because it doesn’t really do anything beyond the moment. You’re going to want to do something that feels like it’s accomplishing things. Working towards a particular goal, short term or long term in some way. You want to feel like you’re doing something rather than nothing and the kind of thing that other people value. Hopefully if the goal you have is important enough, other people will also want to get together with you and work towards that goal.
As a result, if you work together everyone gets something out of it. Some people might get more out of it than others but the end goal should be for everyone to benefit in some way. On the most basic level, we want things like food and a place to sleep. People who work with you are more likely to help you get these things if you're good enough at it. If all goes well, you might want to work with these people again in the future. You can create more if you like the people around you and can function as a group towards many different goals. Maybe you can even work towards helping others get their portion of food and shelter. We think of this idea as work.
Firefly is very much about why work is important. Captain Mal Reynolds, as played fantastically by Nathan Fillion, is all about the work he’s doing. Along with his crew like Wash, Zoe, Kaylee, Shepherd Book, Inara and Jayne, as played by Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Ron Glass, Morena Baccarin and Adam Baldwin, have banded together to do something productive for everyone. As a group, they believe in their mutual desire for safety and to provide each other with what they need to survive. Some of them are willing to go further than they probably should in order to get it, but their end goal ultimately is the same.
They’re working together, doing their fair share of work to make sure they can eat, be warm and feel safe when they sleep, going from place to place for work they can get done. It creates a bond between them. One that makes you crave something similar, if you can find a way to get it.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch and you should do yourself a favour and check out the importance of work by watching Firefly as soon as you can.
You can check out Firefly on Disney Plus as well as Amazon.