There Is No Perfect Place
Remote Work Secrets - Edition #30
What's Inside:
Why your job is not a life sentence. Remote work hands back the choice most people don't realize they're allowed to make.
Why connections and referrals beat volume every time. And why sending applications into the void is keeping you stuck.
The Remote Job Fair & Expo is back in September 2026. Why this event exists and why it's different from everything else out there.
This Week's Remote Roles. Real remote roles for Senior Professionals.
There is no perfect place.
One person's hell is another's heaven. And that place that was once heaven for you, may become hell too.
It certainly did for me.
I was 25 when I moved to London. I loved it there - loved the hustle and bustle. There was always something going on: theatre shows, comedy, exhibitions, museums, food markets, countless parks, and pubs…lots of pubs!
Until my 30s.
A lot of my friends left the city for the suburbs, and those who remained were the ones who still wanted to party.
I didn't.
The pub culture got tiresome. I was sick of the two-hour daily commute, the miserable faces on the tube, the smog, the weather, and the price I was paying for a tiny one-bedroom flat where I could hear my neighbours sneezing through the walls.
I was done with London. It was no longer a place I was happy. It felt like my prison.
I needed more greenery, the ocean, and a much slower pace.
But I couldn't see a way out, because this was where my job was. A job I really enjoyed, too.
You can't have a good job AND live somewhere you actually want to live, right?!
Surely you have to choose one?
Or so I thought.
Until March 2020, when everything changed.
Lockdown handed me an unexpected gift. It showed me that work didn't have to own my geography. Remote working was the way out for me.
As soon as I could, I booked a flight to Bali seeing as the London office was closed for lockdown. I'd heard people talk about it - the sunsets, the rice fields, the slower pace. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
And I got it. I REALLY got it. The warmth, the greenery, the sound of the ocean nearby.
Now Bali is far from perfect. The traffic can be chaotic, and things run very differently there. But I felt at peace in a way I never did in London.
Then, two months after arriving, my company called saying they wanted us back in the office.
I remember reading it and feeling something sink in my chest. Not panic exactly. More like clarity.
I had tasted a different kind of life. One where I woke up without dread, where my commute was a five-minute walk to an outdoor office. Where I actually had time to think, breathe, and just be a human being.
I wasn't going back. Not back to the grey mornings, the tube, the same four walls of an open-plan office of recycled air and fluorescent lighting.
I didn't know exactly how I'd make it work. But I knew I had to.
That was five years ago. And this quote has stuck with me ever since:
"If you don't like where you are, move. You are not a tree." — Jim Rohn
This Week's Remote Roles
🎯Fully Remote Jobs (No "Fake Remote" Here):
Now, I know not everyone wants to move to Bali. That's not the point. This isn't really about geography at all.
It's about the fact that remote work hands you back a choice most people don't realise they're allowed to make. Where you live. How you spend your mornings. Whether your commute is two hours or two minutes. Whether your Sunday dread is a permanent fixture or something you actually escape.
A lot of folks in my community (’Remote Rebels’ I call them), feel exactly how I felt in London. Stuck. Not because they hate their work - in fact, lots of them love it - but because their job is dictating their life.
The problem is, finding remote work that's genuinely remote is harder than it should be.
Searches take longer than expected. Applications go into the void. And the people who break through? They're mostly doing it through connections and referrals rather than volume alone.
That's exactly what the Remote Job Fair & Expo was built for.
If you're tired of sending applications into the wind and hearing nothing back, the job fair gives you what the data says matters most: direct human access to decision makers at remote-first companies that are actively hiring.
Last year, 3 attendees received a job offer within 19 days of the event.
This year's event is in September 2026, bigger and better, and the waitlist is now open.
If any of this resonated and you recognise your own situation in it, this is worth looking at.
Stay Rebellious,
Michelle & The RR Team