☕️ (R)emote Expresso #79

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

Nobody would follow you around all day holding up a mirror.

While you talked. While you ran the numbers. While you gave feedback, got feedback, pretended to follow the budget call. A mirror. Inches from your face. The whole time.

You'd call security.

A Stanford researcher named Jeremy Bailenson made roughly this point back in 2021 - minus the security guard. He built the first real theory of why video calls flatten us, and the mirror is his. Seeing your own reflection makes you more self-critical, he said, with a stack of research behind it. Then he pointed out that millions of us now do exactly that. All day. For money.

The part I have to admit: I didn't notice it doing a thing to me. Not for years.

I've been remote since 2006. Before it was cool, before anyone made me.

And for most of those years I worked on an internal team, internal people, cameras off. I had a job. I did the job. Nobody saw my face. I don't think I gave my own face one professional thought in fifteen years.

Then two things happened at once. The world went camera-on. And I got laid off and started building something of my own.

Less a coincidence than a setup.

Nobody warns you about this part: the day your income depends on people you've never met, your face becomes part of the product.

Suddenly it mattered what I wore. It mattered whether I'd put on a bra. I'd be three minutes into a call and realize I'd stopped listening, because I was busy watching myself listen - is that my resting face, did my eyebrow just do the thing, why is the left side like that.

And I picked up a brand-new hobby I never had at the old job, where nobody could see me. Competitive grid-staring. Sizing up everyone else's face, lighting, and jawline, ranking myself against the gallery in real time. A sport with one player and no way to win.

I figured that was just my personality now. Turns out it has a name.

Bailenson's team calls it mirror anxiety - the cost of watching yourself - and hyper-gaze, the strain of a whole wall of faces staring while you stare back. Their data ran past ten thousand people. Women carry more of this fatigue than men, and the mirror is the part that opens the gap.

The self-view feature costs women more. Mechanism, not vanity. The software wrote the bill and slipped it under our doors at different amounts.

I read all that and went, oh. So it wasn't a personality quirk. It was a bill I'd been paying for years without ever seeing it land in my inbox.

Then I went and did the thing that gave the whole mess away. I took a contract back with my old employer. Cameras-off land. The home I forgot I had.

And the second I got there, my shoulders came down from around my ears.

It's almost funny when someone flips their camera on now - I flinch like a possum in a porch light. Oh no. We're doing faces? In this economy?

That's when I knew. You don't feel the weight of a thing until somebody lifts it off you.

The flattering story would be that going on camera made me braver. People in my new world say it constantly - I love your energy. Strangers. First calls. Unprompted. Fifteen years on the internal team, not once. So for a while I wondered if the energy was real, or if I was just performing it now that there was finally an audience.

Cameras off at the old place settled that. I still stick out. Still a little feral. Nobody's watching, and it didn't go anywhere.

So it wasn't the camera. It was this.

I spent twenty-four years performing a tidier version of me. The one who fit on an org chart. Sat still. Didn't say the weird thing out loud. It was exhausting, and I assumed everyone was that tired.

Then I got laid off, rebuilt from nothing, and somewhere in those two unemployed years got diagnosed with ADHD. Forty-some years of "why is this so hard" finally had a reason behind it.

The camera never made me perform. I'd been performing for two decades. It just bolted on a mirror so I could grade the act while I did it. The diagnosis is what let me put the act down.

So. Hide your self-view. Genuinely. Most platforms let you kill the little window without killing your camera, and it's the actual recommendation from the actual man who named the problem. Click it today. It helps.

But I won't pretend that's the whole fix, because not everyone gets to choose. Sales, client work, any room where cameras-off reads as checked-out - that square is mandatory and the bill comes anyway.

The all-day mirror is a default somebody picked. Not a law of physics. You're allowed to say it's too much.

I hide my self-view now. When I remember.

When I forget, I catch that face in the corner doing its little performance for nobody, and I think - there she is. Still working a room with no one in it.

Then I close the window. And I get those few minutes back.

No one hands these out. So I will.

A short ceremony for the performances you give every day, on camera, with no idea anyone's keeping score. Somebody is. It's you.

Best Performance in a Supporting Square
To you, for spending an entire meeting watching your own face react instead of the person who was actually talking.

Outstanding Achievement in Lighting
To you, who moved a lamp, then a chair, then the whole desk, in pursuit of the one angle where your jaw agreed to cooperate.

Best Live Hair Adjustment
Performed on camera, in front of everyone, in the unshakable belief that no one could possibly see you do it.

Best Dramatic Hold
For the face you keep perfectly, heroically still for ninety seconds while you work out whether you're still sharing your screen.

Best Supporting Nod
To you, for warm, committed, continuous agreement with a point you lost the thread of four minutes ago.

Best Production Design
For the shelf, the plant, and the one carefully angled object, all arranged to suggest you're a person who has their life in order.

Best Ensemble Work
To the whole grid, for twelve people in twelve rooms, each one quietly watching only themselves, all certain they're the only one doing it.

Lifetime Achievement
To the one face you never auditioned for the role, for years of unbroken performance in front of its only viewer. You.

The ceremony is over. Your camera is still on.

Pick one call this week and cut it down to a single face. Hide your own square first, then switch off gallery view so the only person on screen is whoever's talking. That's the whole thing. It's how a conversation works in a room - you look at the one person speaking, not a wall of staring faces with yours mixed in.

Notice if the call feels shorter. Notice if you catch more of what was said. Notice where your shoulders end up.

You're not hiding. You're just declining to be watched by a crowd that includes you.

You don't have to win the whole camera war this week. You just have to find the one meeting that doesn't need your face, and say so.

Paste this into your AI of choice. It interviews you first, then builds the plan. It won't pretend to know your calendar or your team - it can't, so it asks.

You'll be on a call this week and catch yourself in that little corner square. I know, because I will too. I'm not going to tell you what to do about it - you've had enough instructions for one issue. I just want you to know I'm over here doing the same thing, in a different kitchen, probably the same minute. Small comfort. I'll take it.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: The contract gig is cameras-off, which means the bra is back to optional. Reader, I have never been more relaxed.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.