☕️ (R)emote Expresso #66

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

Mara is in a meeting. Eleven people, four continents, one shared screen.

Someone asks how she's doing. She opens her mouth.

And then she stops.

Because the true answer doesn't exist in English. She's not tired. Not burned out. Not "a little overwhelmed." She is something specific: the feeling of having worked so hard and so long that the work itself has become delicious. Joyfully exhausted. Satisfied and depleted in exactly equal measure.

She searches. She finds nothing.

So she says "good" and moves on.

This question started in the community and moved to LinkedIn. Someone had been looking for a word - for years, it turned out - to describe elated exhaustion. The search went across Tagalog, German, Japanese, Danish. A friend in New Zealand was pulled in to see if te reo Māori had something that fit.

Nobody found it.

Not because the feeling is rare. Because the word doesn't exist yet. Most cultures built language for rest, joy, or collapse. The specific cocktail of "I am destroyed and grateful about it" is newer than that. Maybe post-industrial. Maybe just post-Zoom.

When a team of fifty people across twenty countries does their work in a single language - and that language is English - something gets lost that isn't on anyone's agenda. Not the communication. The texture of it. The precision. The parts that make a colleague feel like a person instead of a job title in a different time zone.

This issue is about that gap.

Not a crisis. Not a call to action. Just the thing you've been noticing without having a name for it.

Your language is showing. So is ours.

Welcome to issue #66. We're glad you're here - whatever language you arrived in.

Remote work gave us global teams. It didn't give us a shared language for what that actually costs.

Gen Z grew up code-switching between platforms, personas, and languages before they ever joined a company. They're fluent in the performance of English professionalism. What they're still figuring out is whether the person behind that performance is welcome at work too.

Millennials are often the ones running the global calls, writing the style guides, setting the tone. Many built careers inside English-as-default without ever naming it as a choice. It was just the water. A lot of them are only now starting to notice the water.

Gen X watched globalization happen in real time and mostly celebrated it. The question of who was doing the extra cognitive work to make the collaboration feel seamless - that one didn't come up much. It's coming up now.

Boomers built the meeting structures, the memo formats, the professional norms that became the template everyone else inherited. Most of that happened before global remote teams were even a concept. The template wasn't designed to exclude anyone. It just wasn't designed with everyone in mind.

Different generations. Different relationships to the default. Same gap underneath.

Nobody chose English on purpose. It just won. And a lot of people have been quietly doing the translation work ever since - not just of words, but of entire ways of thinking - without anyone stopping to notice.

Working in your second language is not the same as speaking it fluently.

You can be completely fluent in English - reading it, writing it, presenting in it - and still spend a measurable portion of every workday doing something your native English-speaking colleagues never have to do. Translating not just words, but intent. Register. Nuance. The difference between "that's interesting" and "that's interesting." The weight of a word choice you're not quite sure about.

Morad Salehi, a native French speaker working at a fully remote PR agency, found this out the hard way. During a meeting, he told colleagues he would "pass out" on some new ideas. His colleagues immediately asked if he was okay. He meant "pass on." Two words. One letter of difference. And suddenly the meeting had stopped being about ideas.

When he first joined, he would write notes before a meeting and double-check them via Google Translate to ensure he could share his input clearly. Every meeting. Before every meeting. Work that his native English-speaking colleagues never had to do and probably never noticed wasn't happening on their end.

Dr. Patricia Schmidt, a non-native Spanish speaker who teaches at a Chilean university, described it this way: speaking for three hours about complex topics in a second language feels "like flexing a muscle so much that it feels numb."

The people absorbing this overhead are often the ones who appear most capable. They're fluent. They present well. Nobody sees the extra processing happening behind that.

One thing that actually helps: build in a beat.

If you run meetings, pause for ten seconds after complex discussions before moving to decisions. Not a long pause. Just enough for someone processing in two languages to catch up, formulate a thought, and actually say it - instead of letting the moment pass because the native speakers already moved on.

It costs nothing. It changes who gets heard.

Three words. Three languages. No English equivalent.

Nunchi (Korean) The subtle art of reading a room - picking up on a shift in tone, a pause before answering, a reply that's shorter than usual. In a physical office, it's ambient. On a remote team, it's a superpower nobody trained for. The colleague who notices that someone's been quiet in a meeting and checks in afterward without being asked? That's nunchi. We don't have a word for it. We barely have a culture for it.

Sisu (Finnish) Not grit. Not resilience. Something older and quieter than both - the capacity to act when you have nothing left. You know the Thursday call you showed up to when it was the absolute last thing you had in you? The deliverable you finished at 11pm not because anyone was watching but because you said you would? That's sisu. English just calls it "getting it done." Finnish knows it's something else entirely.

Sobremesa (Spanish) The time after a meal when nobody leaves. The conversation that has nowhere to go and doesn't need to. Remote work eliminated this almost entirely - not because anyone decided to, but because the call ends and the window closes and there's nowhere to just linger. The best teams find workarounds. A channel that's just for nothing. A standing coffee that has no agenda. They're trying to manufacture sobremesa without knowing it has a name.

_{Word from the Floor is a new column. One word. One language. One sentence on what it means when you're working across time zones and trying to stay human. Got a word your language carries that English can't quite hold? Reply to this email. Best submissions run here - your name, your word, your language.}

Thursday, March 19

12 PM CDT | 1 PM EDT | 5 PM GMT | 6 PM CET | 12 AM SGT

Leigh-Anne Nugent pronounces her name Lee-An New-gent. She mentions this upfront. It's a small thing that tells you something about how she operates - she removes friction before it becomes friction.

She's been inside enterprise organizations for over two decades. Salesforce, Brookfield Asset Management, field service operations at scale. The kind of work where something breaks and three hundred people feel it. She's 13x Salesforce certified. She built Tinker Time Labs - her word for it is workshop - because she needed somewhere to put everything she was learning before bringing it to clients.

The secret she shared when she joined (R) Generation: she and her mom are building her digital twin together. It started as a leadership and AI experiment. Her mom is having so much fun it might become a real product.

This Thursday she's running a session called Innovation Opportunity Finder: Turning Pain Points into Growth Bets. The premise is simple and most teams get it wrong. A pain point isn't a problem to solve. It's information. The question is whether your team knows how to read it - or whether you're just wincing and moving on.

Ever left a meeting knowing you didn't quite say what you meant? Not because you were wrong. Because the words weren't there.

This week's prompt is for that moment.

What you'll get: a short conversation that ends with language you can actually use. In a message, a meeting, a one-on-one. Wherever the thing you couldn't say needs to go.

Somewhere between Tagalog, German, Danish, and te reo Māori, there's a word for exactly what you're feeling right now.

We haven't found it yet.

We'll keep looking.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: The fact that you read this far is its own untranslatable thing.

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