When Our Systems Shut Down, Community Shows Up

In my family, I have two favourite cousins. And my other favourite cousin died last week.

He’d been living with Motor Neurone Disease for two years — it started slowly, then rapidly shut down his entire body.

It was as if a committee had been set up in his body, slowly getting to work to randomly close things off.

Once the committee found the system, their rhythm intensified, working more efficiently with each passing moment.

The committee was able to proceed more quickly towards the end because fewer elements of his immune system remained to resist them.

The whole thing reminded me of how my mum died 25 years ago. She'd been given a year to live and died six months ahead of schedule—and it was a good thing she jumped the queue.

After six months, I was already a wreck and didn't know what to do with myself.

Mentally, every day was like leaving the house in a fire and working out what to grab and what to leave behind.*

I could not cope.

My drinking and drug career hit an all-time high, and when I went home to see her, I'd nap on the bed next to her and hope she'd still be there when I woke up.

I'm much more evolved now.

I've been 'clean', as they say, for 20 years.

Lucky for me, in February 2005, #Supercoolwife arrived. She made it clear from the start that her daily routine didn't include any of my shit like that.

I had a choice.

I, of course, chose her.

I had my last call with my cousin more than a week ago, and looking back, maybe he knew it was the last one.

We spoke for 20 minutes, which for him was the same amount of intense exertion as running a marathon would be for me right now.

I was walking around Vigo, chatting with him on the phone. We've talked more than ever in the last year, both knowing we're on a timer.

Yesterday, I was walking those same streets, past all the points that were conversation triggers or reminders: 'I must call James.'

Now they are happy reminders of him.

He loved the outdoors, particularly biking up Mont Ventoux, canoeing, and hang gliding, all of which he enjoyed with his family. He clocked up miles around Europe every summer, pursuing these activities.

In the fifty or so years he spent on Earth, he quietly and gently did more than most people do in a lifetime. He was a physicist and scientist by trade, working in industry, academia, and education.

Of course, all this loss and emotion in my own life sharpened my perspective on what is happening in the rest of the world.

The Pattern of Shutdowns

It seemed everywhere I looked in the last two weeks, something was rapidly deteriorating, being pulled apart, or shutting down—either physically or metaphorically.

Then I saw this Instagram post by Misan Harriman—Gaza burning, Bezos celebrating, NHS collapsing.

And it was so obvious:

This isn't a coincidence.

It's a pattern.

One shutdown after another.

Grief, city, system, silence.

Just like that committee in my cousin's body, there are systems at work, but these are designed, funded, and profitable.

In 2024, Lockheed Martin reported revenue of over $71 billion.

That's more than $8 million per hour—every hour of every day.

Global military spending in 2022 reached $2.46 trillion.

And somehow, these companies—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon/RTX, Northrop Grumman—never appear in our LinkedIn roundups of successful innovators.

We never get breathless TED talks about their tech stacks, even though you know the engineering is probably next-level.

There's no HubSpot podcast about their "culture of excellence."

No Morning Brew newsletter breakdown of their Radical Candour.

Why?

Because it's too real.

Because Laser Guided Bombs don't look good in a Canva carousel.

Because we all know—deep down—that these wars don't have winners.

Not in Israel. Not in Palestine. Not in the UK. Not in the US.

Just Lockheed or whoever is cashing the cheques.

Of course, we need to have defence, fighter jets, and an army, but the politicians constantly stirring such division and craving war and weapons should listen more to the public.

When Art Becomes the Problem

This same pattern—where profit from violence gets protected while human responses get criminalised—played out in real time this weekend at Glastonbury.

Bob Vylan made headlines for what he said on stage—words that upset a lot of people and sparked a wave of media outrage and police scrutiny.

But underneath the noise, something else was happening: more and more artists were using their time on stage to name what they were seeing and who they stood with.

Glastonbury has always been a political space—from nuclear disarmament logos on the Pyramid Stage to Stormzy to Jeremy Corbyn.

This year, Bob Vylan wasn't alone.

CMAT, Inhaler, Nadine Shah, Kneecap, Jade Thirlwall, Gurriers, Wolf Alice, Black Country New Road—all spoke up. Flags were flown. Chants echoed across fields.

Even Jordan Stephens' mum waved a keffiyeh from the stage.

This wasn't a one-off.

It was the most significant signal yet.

The crowd knows. The artists know. The Irish Government knows it.

The only people who seem confused are those who are elected leaders, such as Stammer and Lammy in the UK.

There's a video by Femi Oluwole, ‘Should Bob Vylan be arrested for Glastonbury chant?’ where he breaks this all down better than I can.

He contrasts what Bob Vylan said with actual hate speech that's gone unpunished—speech that led to real attacks on asylum centres.

And then he asks the right question:

Why are we criminalising protest music while selling weapons used to kill children?

We're not being protected.

We're being distracted.

Because if we were truly paying attention—really paying attention—we'd be asking tougher questions.

About who profits from silence.

About who decides which grief is respectable and which is radical.

About why it's "too far" to say Free Palestine, but never too far to sell bombs after everything that has been documented in Gaza in recent months.

The Ecosystem of Exhaustion

When you zoom out, it's not just about Palestine.

It's a whole ecosystem designed to keep us numbing out, scrolling past, or fighting each other.

What scares me more than any of this is the way people are being framed as threats, not for violence, but for empathy.

Human rights groups, protestors, artists, and even aid workers. The government's trying to draw a line around what you're allowed to care about.

And when I say government, I don't just mean 10 Downing Street. I mean the whole tangle of power—state, media, corporate platform, military contract.

• They don't need you to agree.
• They need you to be too tired, too unsure, or too distracted to act.
• However, the good news is that there's still one thing they can't fully break down: community.

Community Is What Actually Saves Us

The common theme running through many things that inform me is a call to community, not that wanky ‘branding and marketing’ community, but a face-to-face, listening, sometimes inconvenient community.

Dan Buettner, through his Blue Zones, demonstrates that social connection, movement, and purpose can add years to our lives.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, who taught me that local economies aren't old-fashioned—they're future-proof on Local Futures.

Gary Stevenson, who keeps naming how financial systems are designed to extract, and how clarity is power.

Jon Alexander, whose work on citizenship redefined how I view coworking, not as desks, but as a form of democracy.

It all points to the same thing:

What saves us isn't stronger algorithms.

It's stronger relationships.

Not another tool. Not another campaign.

Just people—knowing each other, noticing more, and refusing to shut down.

This week brought that home again with Lena's family - see below.

Watching our community respond is exactly what I mean by real connection.

This is what shows up when systems fail.

📚 Read: The coworking community’s deafening silence about Gaza

The Stories Behind the People We Think We Know

Those of you who attended the refugee event at Oru Space will have had the opportunity to hear Vibushan speak in person.

He shared stories from his childhood in Sri Lanka—growing up under curfew, with his mother forced to walk to the hospital at night because his father would have been shot if he tried to go with her.

Vibushan is the co-founder of Oru Space, and we recently recorded a together, diving deep into community, belonging, and the work that still needs to be done.

After the podcast, Vibushan mentioned a book called Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, and I started reading it.

He said the book took him back there—and reminded him of Palestine right now.

That stuck with me.

How stories from faraway places and long ago can still help us feel seen and understood today.

We pass by people every day who've lived through killing fields, poverty, abuse, genocide, slavery, and lost everything.

In all my years in London, coworking spaces have been where I've met people from many different walks of life, mostly building or creating their own ventures. I've come to know their backstories, and I understand their cultures, politics, and music.

Coworking spaces opened up London for me in ways no other medium has ever done.

It's worth pointing out that I met both Sangeeta and Vibushan through coworking.

Sangeeta's book Bad Daughter narrates her childhood in a Mumbai slum—something I only fully realised about her when I read her memoir. 

She's now a vital podcaster living in East London and advocating for women, but knowing her true origin story deepened my understanding of the journeys the people around me carry with them.

It's another reminder of how the people we meet in these spaces have lived through experiences that would break most of us, yet they show up every day, building something meaningful.

Nearly everybody you read about in my work or hear on our Coworking Values Podcast has come to me through coworking.

Ultimately, my strong belief about coworking is that it still allows us to connect on a very human level—an unstructured, physical contact sport of connection.

Bernie's Picks

Here's what I've been reading, using, and listening to lately—as usual, things I want to share.

📱 App: One Sec

I've never felt so completely intoxicated by social media as in the last two weeks. Those iPhone timers weren't cutting it anymore.

The One Sec is the next level of blockade—a pause between impulse and scroll.

It's been saving my brain, one delay at a time - I’ve gone from two hours to five minutes in a few days.

📖 Books:

Looking for Palestine by Najla Said
I read her father's work at university, and it has stayed with me for decades.

This is her story—a perspective shaped by identity, displacement, and inherited contradiction.

It's honest, heartwarming, and quietly political.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
I picked this up after hearing Vibushan from Oru Space talk about it in this short clip. It's a challenging read, but beautifully narrated.

Quiet resistance, brutal systems, and the way memory is carried through mothers. It gave me more language for the kind of grief and clarity I've been writing through lately.

🎧 Podcast: Choosing the Right Software for Your Coworking Space – Not Someone Else's Setup With Fiona Ross

I get asked all the time, ‘Bernie! What’s the best coworking software?’

And the answer is never: “The one sponsoring my event.” 🤪

My friend Fiona has an ‘oracle’ when it comes to coworking space software and hardware; she is also a Scrum Master, understands how buildings and companies operate, and knows what members need.

Most of all, she knows how to put the puzzle together and not rush in.

*A flood of short notice

The truth is, I'd already written about grabbing what you can when you leave a burning house — and then, Monday morning, Lena called me.

Many of you reading this know Lena — she has been an incredibly generous part of our universe for the last 15 years.

She asked if I could help her, and here we are.

But I’m happy to include this paragraph unelegantly at the end here.

The ‘CTA’ aligns with the tone of this post, and I love Lena.

Her brother Josh's family in New Zealand had exactly that ‘grab what you can’ moment.

• Flash floods gave them 30 minutes to evacuate with just the clothes on their backs.
• Everything else — photos, kids' treasures, years of building a home — got washed away.
• Her brother is a builder, and with the flood, he lost a lifetime's worth of tools: the gear he's carefully collected, learned to use, and relied on to build his life and work.

All gone in an instant.

→ Lena's now raising funds to help her family rebuild: Help her out here.

Even a shout on her LinkedIn post would show support.

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round

I'm sitting up here in Vigo, looking out over the sea and the hills.

It's easier to breathe here. That doesn't mean I forget. It means I'm better able to see the cracks.

Not just in the world, but in myself.

And maybe that's the point—noticing. Holding space. Staying awake.

Even when everything wants you to look away.

If you're feeling the weight of it all—the grief, the outrage, the exhaustion—know you're not alone.

Thank you for your time and attention today

Bernie 💚