☕️ (R)emote Expresso #65

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is your weekly dose of creator insights on remote collaboration designed to fuel your day, delivered once a week in your inbox 💌

The Call That Started This

Hey Remote Rebels and Digital Daydreamers,

It was Thursday morning.

I was on a Google Meet with three people I've never physically been in the same room with. I'd rolled out of bed, thrown on whatever was closest, and was blasting CAKE through my speakers to convince my brain it was awake.

One of the folx on the call described herself as a raccoon.

I'm a wombat. We've established this. Armored butt, crushes predators with its hindquarters, poops in cubes. Totally me.

Nobody performed. Nobody pretended. Nobody showed up as the polished version of themselves they reserve for people they're trying to impress.

And somewhere in the middle of a conversation about AI and community and whether you can build something real with people you've only ever seen in a little rectangle on a screen - I heard myself say something I've never really said aloud before:

"For the first time in my life, I feel like I was born at the right time."

I'm Gen X. I spent nearly 30 years in corporate rooms where I was too much of something and not enough of something else. Too fast. Too many ideas arriving sideways at inconvenient moments.

Somewhere around year eight I stopped saying the thing I actually thought. It felt like professionalism. It was an iron straitjacket.

And now there's this moment - weird, unfinished, nobody-knows-the-rules-yet.

I fit.

Not because I changed.

Because I stopped pretending I wasn't feral.

We were the generation nobody was waiting for.

Boomers had the boom. Millennials had the internet handed to them in college with a how-to guide and a sense of destiny. Gen Z never knew anything different.

We got the fax machine on its way out and the internet on its way in and approximately zero instruction for either.

We learned to adapt because we had no choice. We got good at figuring things out alone, in the middle, without a manual. We built workarounds for systems that weren't built for us and called it competence because nobody was offering another option.

Corporate loved us for it. Wrung us out like a dish rag and called it resilience.

And then - somewhere around the time we were supposed to be hitting our stride - the whole thing started breaking apart. Layoffs. Restructures. Return-to-office mandates from people who'd spent two years telling us location didn't matter.

So when I say I feel born at the right time, I don't mean things are easy.

I mean: the specific combination of skills I built surviving all of that - the adaptability, the self-sufficiency, the allergy to performative professionalism, the ability to build connection without a script - those are exactly what this moment needs.

We were trained for this without knowing it.

Feral, it turns out, was preparation.

Gen X is always forgotten.

Maybe that's why this feels so good.

Gen Z (ages 12-27) They never had to be tamed in the first place.

Born into the internet, raised on authenticity culture, told their whole lives to "just be themselves." And yet they're entering a workforce that keeps pulling the rug out. Layoffs before they hit 25. AI eating entry-level jobs whole. The career ladder they were promised is missing several rungs.

Their feral is already there. The challenge is protecting it from the machine that wants to monetize it.

What they're figuring out: how to stay real when everything is also content.

Millennials (ages 28-43) They got tamed the hardest.

Came of age during the era of hustle culture, personal branding, and LinkedIn as a personality. Performed their way through 2008, student debt, housing markets that laughed at them, and a pandemic. Got very good at looking okay when they weren't.

Their feral got buried under a decade of survival mode.

What they're figuring out: that the version of themselves they shelved in 2012 is still in there. And it's annoyed.

Gen X (ages 44-59) Already covered. 😏

Boomers (ages 60-78) They built the rooms we all eventually stopped fitting into.

That's not an insult. It's just true. The systems, the structures, the professional norms - they built them because those things worked, for a while, for the world they inherited.

Showing up feral now means something different for them. It means admitting the blueprint has expired. That the rules they followed don't protect anyone anymore.

What they're figuring out: which parts of themselves they traded away for stability - and whether it's too late to get them back.

Different flavors. Same homecoming.

The people in charge don't actually care if you're okay.

I know we're not supposed to say that in a newsletter. But it's March 2026 and pretending otherwise feels like its own kind of iron straightjacket.

The fear is real. The instability is real. And the pressure to keep performing through it - to stay professional, stay palatable, stay small enough not to cause problems - that's real too.

When the institutions stop holding, when the people at the top make it clear the game was never really yours to win - the only thing left that's actually yours is you. Not your job title. Not your salary band. Not your performance review.

You.

The ideas you stopped saying out loud. The instincts you learned to second-guess. The version of yourself that existed before you figured out what it cost to be too much in the wrong room.

That's what going feral reclaims.

Which is exactly when showing up feral stops being a personality quirk and becomes something closer to resistance.

Not everyone gets to do it. The remote worker alone in a studio apartment for the fourth day straight. The 58-year-old six months into a job search with no callbacks. The person being dragged back into an office by someone who controls their rent and calls it culture.

For them, feral isn't a vibe. It's a risk they can't afford yet.

Feral is a privilege when you have a safe place to be wild.

Which is why the burrow matters. Not just as a place to decompress - but as a place where people who've never been allowed to show up as themselves can try it for the first time.

The raccoons and the wombats don't just enjoy the burrow.

They keep the door open.

Someone said: "I don't feel like we have our soul yet."

Someone else pushed back immediately.

Someone said the value is already there - just hidden. Like seeds that haven't broken the surface.

Someone said you can't force engagement. That people come when the thing is real, not when you optimize the onboarding sequence.

And then someone said something I haven't stopped thinking about.

That the reason people love showing up here is because there's no perfect layout to perform for. No polished agenda to follow. No approval required before you bring your weird idea to the table.

Just folx, in rectangles, being exactly who they are.

Four people. Four countries. No makeup. No script. One hour that ran long because nobody wanted to stop - straight into Hangout & Tinker, which, honestly, felt about right.

And I walked away feeling something I don't feel after most meetings.

Like I'd actually been in a room with people.

We all have a list. The qualities we learned to hide. The instincts we stopped trusting. The ideas we swallowed because the room wasn't safe enough for them.

This prompt finds yours.

The AI does the digging. You just show up.

You don't need a plan.

You don't need the right moment or the right room or the right version of yourself.

You just need the next opportunity and enough nerve to take it.

The wombat doesn't ask permission before crushing the predator with its armored butt.

Neither should you.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: You didn't come this far to keep apologizing for how you're built.

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