Member-only story
Working 2050 is an homage to Studs Terkel’s Working, a series of possible interviews with workers of the future.
My mother always wanted me to be something practical, like an artist. Every time she visits she waits until I’m totally geared up and starting morning chores and then follows me at a distance, and spends the whole trip behind me standing in the yard with her hands on her hips. “You don’t even get any good selfies because you’ll be covered in netting.”
She’s a little older, so she was always all about brand identity when I was a kid (I think a lot of gen Z is like that). when I first told her I was interested in bees i was 8 and she was excited, she kept adding all of these “machine learning for pollination” courses to my queue. Even when I told her I wanted to be like, an old timey beekeeper, with just a couple of hives I think she was still excited, thinking about microniches and AR content. She made me finish the filmmaker and monetization tracks on Coursera before I turned 18, but after that I focused all of my attention and course credits on bees: preservation, care, behavior, all of it.
I was a moderator for /beekeeping when I was 15 so by the time I was ready to apprentice somewhere I already knew a bunch of great people who had the right permits. one of them was in Montana and had the perfect setup: 800 hives, an extra room, and no…
