You’re One In Two Million
Can you guess how many flowers, on average, a bee hive has to travel to and gather nectar from to make one pound of honey? (One pound, by the way, is roughly equivalent to those little teddy bear jars you see at the grocery store.)
Our guess was 10,000. Which was only… a huge bit off. According to this Radiolab episode, the answer is 2 million. That’s 2 million trips honey bees make to flowers. Two million stems that grow and blossom and quietly do what they were made to do. Two million small, ordinary moments that, together, become one jar of honey that most of us buy without thinking twice about.
It can be easy to confuse purpose with grandeur. If my life has meaning, then it must have a grand meaning. We want to stand out from the crowd; few of us wake up thinking, I just want to be one in the crowd. “Leadership” fills college courses, resumes, podcasts. “10 steps to being a great follower” doesn’t trend.
But the reality, as Oliver Burkeman writes in the final chapter of Meditations for Mortals, is simple: “reality doesn’t need me to help operate it.” You can have the best day of your life or the worst. You can experience something extraordinary or just move through another quiet Tuesday. Either way, the planet turns. We are part of a crew hanging in the infinitude of space, and if you zoom out far enough, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most famous person to ever walk the earth. Your journey will end. And the world spins madly on (song reference).
You are a unique person with a unique purpose… just like everyone else. That truth can feel a little brutal when you let it land. It shatters the illusion of grandeur that quietly burdens so many of us. The pressure to be exceptional, to be more, to justify our existence with something big enough to feel worthy.
Our lives don’t really matter. But they do matter. So much.
The contradiction is the point. It humbles us. It pulls our attention back to what’s right in front of us: who we are, the decisions we make, the people we love, the path we choose. If all we are is one of two million flowers that together make a single jar of honey, then we have to accept that this is our purpose. To show up, to blossom, to offer what we have. Two loaves, five fishes. What a story! But … it was just one meal.
To live otherwise is to abandon that purpose in favor of ego, which is nothing more than a fragile bubble floating around, convincing us we need to be bigger than we are, before inevitably popping.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is widely considered one of the most successful tours ever. Over the course of 18 months, she played for around 10 million people. A staggering number. But… it’s just five jars of honey. Even Taylor.
And yet, taste a bit of honey one morning, or watch an aging millennial who siphoned their retirement account to buy a ticket dancing their heart out to Shake It Off from a live show (totally hypothetical, by the way), and tell me it isn’t worth it.
Your purpose is worth it too. Accepting the reality of its scale isn’t limiting. It’s freeing. It lets you stop chasing something abstract and start paying attention to the quiet, ordinary, deeply meaningful work of being one of two million flowers. Because that’s how the honey gets made.
