The Pollinator Manifesto

A new way of looking at my brain at work

“Wait, I thought you were writing a romance novel?”

“What about the documentary you were making?”

“Are you still consulting though?”

“So you’re studying trees now I heard?”

My whole life I have been giving my friends whiplash. If you asked my own brother what I do, I am sure he would laugh and change the subject, unable to answer. 

He has had one job for the last 10 years while I’ve had about 10 jobs in the last one year. Across relationships, hobbies, and homes, I dabble, he commits.

He’s the type of guy to buy a dozen roses. Roses are nice, but I want a colourful spring bouquet. I want roses and lilies and sunflowers and orchids and tulips.

I have tried to be more like my brother¹ but, despite our shared upbringings and genes, a life like his feels utterly against my nature. 

I wake up each morning feeling like a bee, driven to get to work, even if I don’t quite know what that work will be. I just know that I want to fly.

Did you know only 2% of wild bee species are responsible for 80% of pollination visits around the world? Or that not all bees within a species pollinate? Male bees (drones) don’t pollinate, neither do the queens.

Just as we can’t expect all bees to pollinate, it’s simply not in their nature, we can’t expect all humans to drone.² 

While some, like my brother, are quite content living a life of routine,³ I am not.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I wanted to try every ice cream flavour sold at our local market (I didn’t want to hurt any of their feelings). I didn’t understand how my friends could have favourite colours; I declared mine to be rainbow. I was determined, determined!, to know every person in my hometown of 650,000 people. My hobby has always been trying new hobbies.

I am a pollinator.

I’m sometimes accused of being impatient, or lacking focus, but I believe I was meant to move from one flower to the next.

I wish I could tell you that my career looked like a fresh spring bouquet, but it’s more like a weekly box of fruits and vegetables from your local farm share. Too many zucchinis and turnips, a bunch of spinach with worms in it, a few apples you’d rather weren’t there, and, finally, the reason you signed up for this overpriced organic chore in the first place, a handful of perfectly ripe strawberries.

Pollinators like me are often diagnosed with ADHD, and labelled for all the things we don’t have, ignoring what we do have, in abundance: a drive towards the unknown that benefits everyone in the colony.

Even if a single flower, hypothetically, offered all the nourishment we could ever need, the health of the overall garden would suffer if we didn’t trust our pollinator instincts. We would suffer too.

And we do.

Under immense social pressure, we focus on a single career path; we take medication so we can maintain that focus; and we gag that little voice inside us that just wants to be free.

I briefly looked like I had my life on a coherent track. I leveraged my Ivy League MBA (talk about a healthy bunch of spinach!) to get a coveted job in tech that I even managed to hold on to for five years! Like my ambitious MBA classmates and my talented colleagues, I tried to care about the money being added to my account every two weeks and the OKR meetings and product updates. I promise you, I tried.

I wrote lists of pros and cons to convince myself to hold on, but there were no cons to speak of. The job was great, all strawberries. It just wasn’t me.

Many people, especially of the drone variety, don’t know what to do with you if you say you do “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” They feel the need to give you advice, to help you get back on track, mistaking your wandering path for being lost.

I’ve never been lost. I have just been misunderstood. Like the poor turnips in my farm share box that I don’t know what to do with.⁴

But I see some promising signs that the “future of work” will embrace us pollinators. Our skills have never been in higher demand: we are adaptable, flexible, quick learners, excited by new technologies and challenges, curious, and creative. We love to experiment and explore.⁵ I’m just waiting for the day when companies start hiring full time Dabblers.

Until then, please don’t feel bad for us if it looks like we don’t know what our purpose is. Not knowing is our purpose.⁶

1. In case it wasn’t clear, I absolutely adore my brother. I’m envious of the deep friendships and strong community he has as a result of living in the same neighbourhood his whole life. I am jealous he plays instruments well enough to be in bands, and can be in those bands long enough for the other members to become family. I wish I had half the expertise on anything that he has on engineering HVAC systems. I’m so endlessly proud of the man he has become. But we are different.

2. Yes I know humans are not bees, and that I shouldn’t anthropomorphize them (or other living beings), but I don’t care. I believe we have created enough separation between our human selves and nature, it won’t hurt us to try to find some more common ground.

3. Power to the drones! Seriously, throw out whatever image you may have of drones being mindless robots. We need them as much as we need pollinators. 

4. Did you know you can sneak turnips into nearly any dish once you learn how to take the bitterness out?!

5. Not to mention we are not worried about hostile work environments or being replaced by robots. If you are, follow us, because we are not afraid of quitting when we’re out of alignment, and we reject any work that feels robotic in the first place.

6. When we’re lucky, all this flying around that looks like not-knowing results in a basket of delicious, sent-from heaven strawberries!