Your weekly email is a small act against loneliness

25 people who open your emails are worth more than 20,000 followers who scroll past.

The last few weeks have been a lot of conversations about mental health, loneliness, and community — and it turns out next week is Loneliness Awareness Week, which I didn't know until one of those conversations surfaced it.

We've never been so connected and so divided at the same time. You probably don't need me to join the dots between being a consumer and your mental health. This time last year I was getting ill from scrolling — a constant low hum of anger, depression, and anxiety — and still kept going even though I knew better.

For years I'd kept social media apps buried on my phone, hidden behind timers and blockers. It didn't matter. I'd pick up my phone to check my calendar before bed and two hours later I'd still be on it, late to sleep, dreaming about whatever I'd been scrolling.

Last December I asked Ewan what he got out of Talk Club, that he runs in his coworking sapce.

He told me one thing he'd done was just stop using Instagram. I am so weedy and impressionable I needed permission from another David Bowie fan to do the same.

I have been writing on the internet since 2006. The thing that has kept me most connected through all of it is not a platform, not an algorithm, not a growth strategy. It is a weekly email — a consistent, showing-up-in-your-inbox act of thinking out loud to real people.

When you run a community and write an email that names the people in it, links to what they're doing, tells their story — you are doing something small and consistent to combat loneliness.

Not cure it. Combat it. Week by week.

Mark Masters at You Are The Media opens every single email with someone from his community.

• Not a word from our sponsors.
• Not a product placement.
• A person.

Ann Hawkins at Drive Network does the same — links to members, real people, nobody paying for the mention, just part of the community showing up in your inbox. That is the direct opposite of what every platform is engineered to do. The platforms want you scrolling past strangers at two in the morning. A community email introduces you to someone you should actually know.

Two Apps and a Scalpel

Rosie Sherry, of Rosieland, a fellow community builder, posted something around the same time about the addictive mechanisms in Duolingo. She was right. I was keeping a streak, getting anxious if I missed a day, and I wasn't learning a language. I was feeding a number.

I stopped Instagram and Duolingo at the same time and it freed up a lot of space. But that was just the first cut.

Since being diagnosed with ADHD at the end of 2025, I've had to unlearn a lifetime of coping mechanisms. It would have been less of a struggle to shave my head with a combine harvester than to work out how to actually manage the way I work.

In the last few months, with the help of Ann Hawkins, my friends at the Drive Network, and Helen my 'unsticker' and ADHD coach, I've taken a scalpel to how I work and how I make revenue. All my life I've been doing too many things at the same time, and it is only this year I've truly understood how much space I need.

I need to move. I walk and run more than ever, talking into Voicenotes constantly — working through problems, ideas, half-formed things. I'm a lifelong fan of mind mapping and it works like that for me, but in audio.

What I can't do is write on the go. I can have a thousand points, stories, clips, and ideas saved up, but unless I can sit down and properly digest them I cannot get into the work and write something like what you're reading now.

Creating a clearing, protecting it, and not letting anything else in is my biggest job these days. If it doesn't fit into the London Coworking Assembly
— which is where the Coworking Values Podcast lives — or berniejmitchell.com, it doesn't get a hearing.

My new coping mechanism is maintaining space, and asking the people who keep me accountable to make sure I keep it.

Those same people are the reason the Assembly and the podcast are now 100% reader-funded. Most of the coworking press is advertorials masquerading as journalism—saccharine pieces about WeWork, AI, and a loneliness you can cure with a green juice.

They sidestep the glaring division in society, wealth inequality, and the hollowing out of the middle class—the exact people filling these spaces.

They write it that way because a vendor is paying for it. We don't take money to look the other way. The work answers to the people who read it. You can back it here.

The Room of 25

With everything stripped back, I started looking at what had actually worked. Over nearly twenty years I have run somewhere around a thousand meetups, workshops, and gatherings.

Some of those were big. OuiShare Fest in Paris, which I joined in 2013, was over a thousand people. techMAP and London Bloggers Meetup, which I ran with mates from around 2010, pulled serious crowds. I was part of those and they were brilliant.

But Creator Write Club ran every week for years in different London coworking spaces. The most people that ever showed up was 25.

Unreasonable Connection events sit around 50 to 60. Those are the rooms that actually worked, and not because I'm modest about scale — my head falls off at big events, even ones I love.

At Creator Day in Poole, Rosie Sherry and I spent part of it hiding in a corner because we were both having a neurodivergent meltdown, and honestly that tells you everything about how I work best.

At lunchtime Nick Whitnell hosted a screening of Ariana King's film Brewed by the Coast, a powerful story about a local brewery that closed.

It was built into the schedule — a moment to breathe. That's what good event design looks like. Then when it got too exciting, Rachel, Mark and I did an Irish exit and went home for a quiet dinner to recharge for the next day.

I have always believed in Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans and Robin Dunbar's number of around 150 people in a functioning community. If you have 1,000 engaged people on your email list and 150 or so show up in real life, that is the combination. That is what you are building toward.

Meanwhile, my total social media following across platforms is north of 20,000 and I don't know who's paying attention anymore. Social media has not worked for me personally since before COVID. I am not saying it doesn't work — it's the new TV. But what works for the way I like to operate is small groups of highly connected people.

I never wanted to be the largest, biggest, longest, number one anything in the world. Who believes that shit anyway? That is 90s marketing speak.

Your Email Already Has a Shape

I first came across this from Brian Clark of Copyblogger back in 2009: build on your own real estate. Email is the primary audience vehicle. You own the list.

When social media arrived and everyone was saying you don't need a website, you just need your Facebook page, Brian was adamant. You have to have your own digital outpost and email list. All these years later, that is still true. I watched a short video of him saying it again last week. The man was right then and he's right now.

About a decade ago I was part of Kenda Macdonald's marketing automation cohort. Kenda teaches neuroscience and marketing, and she is very good at email.

The thing she taught me that made writing every newsletter significantly faster was this: your email already has a shape. You have headings, and you need to find something to fill those headings. Before I understood that I was starting from scratch every single week, which is why most people give up.

I was one of the first seven people to sign up when Hector started This Week in Coworking six years ago. He posted on LinkedIn this week about building his list from nothing — six years of showing up in inboxes. That's the signal.

I was talking to a friend recently about a project they run. I said: I love your project. I only turn up because I go looking for the link.

You never email me. I have never seen a reliable email from a Medium publication I'm subscribed to. Substack goes into different folders. I don't know when your events are.

You should write an email and then turn that into social media, not use social media as the hope that you're reaching out. There is a difference between a platform doing something and you owning the relationship. Brian Clark knew this in 2009. Kenda Macdonald gave me the containers. Hector has been proving it works for six years.

The Space That Nearly Died

I worked with one coworking space that was suffering because a big, shiny competitor opened in the neighbourhood. Everyone caved to the opening offer and jumped ship. Revenue dropped significantly.

This space was established, a pillar of the community, but they were not articulating their value to anyone. I made them start sending an email every week written to the people in the space. It talked about:

• The single mum trying to run a business and pick her kids up in time
• The agency
• The local photographer
• The gentrification in the area
• The loneliness
• The connection to the local community

They also refurbished part of their building into two-person offices, which helped because they built something people actually needed. But even before that, the email helped sell those spaces. Within six months they had tripled their revenue.

They had everything they needed before I arrived. The weekly email just helped them communicate the amazing community that was already there. Now they send it every week, and they talk about the people in their community instead of talking about coworking. Nobody wants to hear about coworking. They want to hear about relatable stuff.

A weekly email to your people about your people is both relevant and useful. The other kind, the harmless but disconnected kind that lands in your inbox and you're not sure why — I am not going to read that. It won't help me thrive and survive.

The Discipline Is the Return

I have not sent an email for three weeks. I was on the road, and I need a lot of space to write and think. I need to be settled. I just don't work well moving around, and that is not a contradiction — it's the point. The discipline isn't never missing. The discipline is coming back.

The first podcast I ever recorded and published was with Seth Godin in November 2012. He told me that he would write and publish even if no one read it, because it exercises your brain and gets ideas out. We also talked about David Bowie.

Seth pointed out that when you hear a David Bowie record, whether you like it or not, you know it's a David Bowie record. When you're thinking and writing and sending, people can tell it's you. That is more relevant now than it has ever been.

Everyone is always telling you to tell your story, and everyone is always confused about how to actually do it. Sending an email every week clarifies your thinking and adds a bit more plot — another chapter.

When you view your newsletter as a never-ending book, with each week being another chapter, that is very different from treating it as a marketing event you have to get through. It's the difference between building something and broadcasting something.

So if you just copy the same stuff as everyone else, it's never going to work. In my honest opinion, you've got to love it when you're sending your newsletter. Outsourcing your email newsletter to the marketing intern who's there for three weeks is a shit idea.

This email, in some shape or form, is something I have been sending for over fifteen years.

What I've put into a five-day course is the thinking behind it — how to use letters to stay connected to the people who matter, to your community, to the work.

Getting your thoughts and intention into an email every week and sending it to a few people will do more for you than any amount of Instagram boosting. Whether you use a bit of paper or a state-of-the-art AI gadget, write it down. Send it. See what comes back.

Monday Domino

Start an email list this week. Not a newsletter. A list.

Pick five people you want to stay better connected to. Open whatever email tool you have. Write them one email.

Three headings:

• What's happening,
• What I'm thinking about,
• What I'm looking forward to.
• Send it. See what comes back.

Hector started his list six years ago and it's still running. You don't need a platform. You need five people and a send button.

Bernie's Picks

• 🇬🇧"Coworking" was said at Prime Minister's Questions this week. Here's how it got there.
• Voicenotes.com — I use this every day when I'm walking and running to capture ideas and talk through work with myself. This note started there.
• Ghost — the open-source publishing platform I moved to. Articles, email, memberships. It just works. And you're not funding a billionaire's rocket programme.
• Brian Clark's recent video — after all these years, he's still right. Email is the primary audience vehicle. Two minutes.
• Audience, Community, or Village? The Framework for Real Connection with Rose Radtke — if you're trying to work out what you're actually building, start here.

After the LinkedIn post about mental health, Stacey from The Tribe flagged that it's Loneliness Awareness Week. I didn't even know that was a thing. A lot of people got in touch off the back of it, so if you can do something this week, do it.