Cocktail Theory: Why We Should Mix Up the Gene Pool
A love letter to variety, integration, and the strange ache of wanting a different kind of future
It was one of those heavy summer days where your skin sticks to everything and your thoughts do the same.
I was lying on my bed, headphones in, fan on, Ziggy stretched beside me. Both of us melting. The window was cracked just enough to let the world in without demanding too much of me. I was that good kind of floaty high where the mind drifts between awe and ache, gratitude and grief.
And somewhere between Solange and Bob Marley, the thought landed like a truth I hadn’t realised I was holding:
Maybe the solution isn’t peace treaties or revolutions.
Maybe it’s procreation.
Or more specifically: integration.
Welcome to what I’ve now lovingly coined Cocktail Theory.
The premise is simple: the world might genuinely be a better place if we all started mixing it up a bit more. Not just in terms of who we date or sleep with, but who we build with. Who we raise children with. Who we merge lineages with.
Not just to end racism (although, yeah, that too), but because something magic happens in the mix.
Genes. Languages. Survival strategies. Music taste. Facial features. History books. Belief systems. Skin tones. All in one tiny body that makes your nan question her worldview and your uncle start learning how to cook jollof rice.
It’s alchemy.
It’s future medicine.
And it’s not a utopian pipe dream. It’s biology. It’s literally what evolution does when left to her own wild devices.
Sameness breeds stagnation. Variety births evolution.
We’ve all seen what happens when systems get too inbred. Families. Nations. Institutions. Religions. The same scripts get passed around like heirlooms. Trauma becomes culture. Ideology turns to dogma. People forget how to question things.
But when you mix? Things move. Things grow. Things shift.
New rhythms are born. New vocabularies. New ways of being that honour what was, but refuse to get stuck in it.
It’s not about erasing difference. It’s about weaving it. Letting it stretch us. Letting it challenge the neat little boxes we were told to live in.
This theory isn’t just some TED Talk idea I came up with. It’s rooted in my own craving for something other. Something more alive than what I was handed.
I look at my son and I don’t just see my boy. I see the future I never had. A lineage rewritten. A boy born from rupture and remembrance.
I think about the stories I inherited and the ones I’m choosing to end with me. The family dynamics I was born into. The bloodlines that run deep with silence and shame. The ways healing has looked like becoming something my ancestors wouldn’t recognise.
And maybe that’s the whole fucking point.
Maybe healing doesn’t always look like going back. It could look like becoming unrecognisable. Uncontainable.
I’m not calling for some global interbreeding initiative. This isn’t a manifesto.
It’s a musing.
A love letter to variety. To curiosity.
Get curious — think about it. Either I'm onto something or it's going to turn into a new book idea.
Until next time,
Jodie x ✌️