In 2023, I got laid off.
It was a remote job with a Silicon Valley nonprofit. When it ended, I looked around my house in Twentynine Palms and realized I needed more than a laptop and a kitchen table to build what came next.
The desert gives you space. Sometimes too much.
Moving to the desert taught me that I was a writer. The wide open spaces give you room to think in a way city life never did. But there's a flip side nobody puts on the postcard. When your office is your kitchen table and your coworkers are a Slack channel, the quiet starts to feel less like peace and more like distance.
I call it professional loneliness. You can be good at your job, connected to people all over the country, and still go days without a real conversation with someone who understands what you do.
And I knew I wasn't the only one. Remote workers, freelancers, small business owners, folks who moved out here for the land and the light. We were all scattered across the Morongo Basin, working out of spare bedrooms and coffee shops, each of us figuring it out alone.
So I built a home base
I needed somewhere to work that wasn't my house. A private room for client calls. An address for my business that wasn't where I sleep. A place where I'd run into other people building something.
That's what Black Cactus Co-Working became. A desk, a door that closes, a mailbox, and a room full of people who get it. It started as the thing I needed. It turned into the thing a lot of us needed.
Who are you in the most extreme environments?
It's a question I've asked myself through a lot of 100-degree summers. Out here, autonomy looks like taking the steps to cool off when it's too hot and warm up when it's too cold, instead of sitting around complaining about the weather.
Black Cactus is my version of that. When the isolation got to be too much, I built a place to get out of it, and opened the door for anybody else who felt the same.
This fall has tested that a little. Water damage hit part of our building, and the open floor is closed while repairs get sorted out. But the conference room is open, the mailboxes are running, and the reason this place exists hasn't changed one bit.
Come say hi
If you're working remote out here and you've been feeling that quiet a little too much, I'd love to meet you. Book the conference room for a few hours, set up a business address, or just reply to our newsletter and tell me what you're working on.
One piece of dirt don't make a brick. We build this together.
– Terence