There are two kinds of pain. One is a prison, the other is a choice.

I have a mate.

And when we talk, all they do is moan.

It's a constant stream of what other people should be doing, how their housemate should have bought a Philips fridge instead of a Bosch, and a dozen different variations of, "I just don't understand why they don't..."

I used to be like this. If you catch me on a bad day, I still can be.

It's tempting to offer advice. To jump in with a solution. To think I know best.

I don't. Not anymore.

But I can't resist writing this. Because I've worked something out.

You have the choice to stop reading. When I'm sitting opposite you in a café, you have to nod along, even if you hate me.

Here, you can close the tab.

But if you're still here, this is something you need to hear.

Because life is urgent. Time matters. And most of us are haemorrhaging energy on things that don't deserve it.

My cousin died this year at 55 after a two-year battle with Motor Neurone Disease. This summer marked my first birthday without him, and, of course, I've been having some deep, reflective moments.

When you look at his family, and the miles they've cycled and walked together, his work and academic career, he certainly did not waste his time on planet earth.

Because how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

The system in your head

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called "When Comfort Becomes Complicity," and I continue to revisit it to unpack its meaning further.

I argued that we're trapped in a story that turns us into passive consumers instead of active citizens. A story where our only power is to choose from a menu of options, while the people who own the menu get rich from our silence.

But what does living inside that story actually do to us?

It turns us into complainers.

It trains us to see our lives as a series of products and services that fail to meet our expectations. Our job, our house, our relationships—they're all just things we can leave a one-star review for.

And it changes how we talk to each other.

You have a limited amount of time with people, and I want you to notice how many people spend that time with you by telling you about the deal they got, or how much they saved on a purchase, from a 2 for 1 on chicken breast at Tesco to their holiday.

When viewed from a financial reporting perspective rather than a conversation-making one, it changes.

If your mate rings you up and says, "Get down to the shop, there's an offer on olive oil and ice cream"—that's useful and a good deal.

Forensically explaining your process of how you bought your fridge and saved £235 in that process does not add value to my life.

I want to hear about you. Not your procurement process for white goods.

But we've been trained to think our purchasing decisions are interesting. That our consumer choices define us. That's how we navigate the marketplace: who we are.

I do it too. I catch myself complaining that the AI is too slow at finding something, when it's infinitely faster than Google. The same Google I used to complain about, even though it was light-years faster than me having to go and buy an encyclopedia.

This is the system in your head. This is the complicity in your conversations.

When we're bitching about our mate's choice of dishwasher brand, we're not talking about the real changes needed in our society - partly because we're not standing in those needed changes ourselves.

On 15 July 1867, Robert Lowe said: "I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters."

And that was how the state-run education system in England got started.

What Robert Lowe meant was that now that the vote had been given to the masses, we must educate them to continue influencing and directing their thinking.

And it continues to happen today, in government and the media.

For example, you could probably tell me the town in Essex on the Central Line where people were protesting about asylum seekers in a local hotel.

But could you tell me about any economic crimes that cost the UK way more?

The UK haemorrhages £350 billion to boardroom crime while obsessing over £3 billion in asylum hotels. We're watching the wrong pocket get picked.

And there's a framework that explains exactly how it works.

The gap and the gain

There's a framework from Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy called "The Gap and The Gain."

The Gap is measuring yourself against an ideal. It's the space between where you are and where you think you should be. It's where frustration, whining, and a sense of victimhood reside. It's my mate complaining about the fridge.

The Gain is measuring yourself backwards, against where you started. It's acknowledging progress, however small. It's the foundation of resilience.

For years, I lived in the Gap. And it almost killed me.

But here's the thing: this isn't just a personal psychology problem. It's how we see the entire world.

Hans Rosling, the Swedish doctor who wrote Factfulness, spent decades showing people how wrong we are about almost everything. He called it the "Gap Instinct"—our tendency to divide the world into extremes and miss the majority who live somewhere in the middle.

Ann Hawkins mentioned the Factfulness book in our Drive networking meeting a few weeks ago. I got this for my Dad when it came out in 2018, and we used to talk about it a lot - he got his news from the BBC, while I got mine from Twitter.

Rich or poor. Good or bad. Developed or developing.

We see gaps everywhere, even when the reality is far more nuanced. Most countries are neither rich nor poor—they fall somewhere in between. Most global trends aren't getting worse—they're actually improving, slowly and quietly.

But we can't see it because we're trapped in Gap thinking.

The same mental trap that makes us complain about the salty salmon also makes us believe the world is more broken than it actually is.

The salmon problem

A friend once said that success doesn't erase your problems, it just gives them better clothes.

Two weeks ago, you were sweating over your phone bill, wondering whether the service would cut you off.

Then something shifts. A new client, an unexpected break, a sudden invite to a party you never thought you'd be at.

And now? You're standing by the canapé table, quietly bitching that the salmon is too salty.

Same brain. Same human. Just different scenery.

That's the trick with money and status—it doesn't make us grateful. It just rewrites the script of what we believe is worth complaining about.

It happens in coworking, too. A space that once fought tooth and nail to keep the lights on can suddenly find itself fretting over whether the plant wall looks authentic enough, or if the free coffee beans are "on brand."

But here's the danger: when you start obsessing over the salmon, you risk forgetting the people who still can't pay their phone bills.

That gap between problems is where inclusion either lives or dies.

I learnt this the hard way during Brexit. I was in a neighbourhood group, and this chap called me a "liberal softy" in the chat. We got talking outside the neighbourhood meeting on the steps of St John's Church near Seven Kings Park.

I said to him, "I'm that liberal softy from the app chat. I'm not offended, but I'm curious to know what you mean by that term."

He avoided any definition, but spoke extensively about how Brexit would "help things." At the time, I was unclear what things it was about to help. And now I'm even more uncertain about how it helped.

But he was all mouth—actually an okay chap, just clumsy with words. The point is, if I hadn't asked him what he meant, I would have carried that around for ages.

We look at things through our lens, and there are many lenses in the world. After investing so much mental energy in our lens, it's a pain in the arse to have to look through another one.

But there is more than one lens for everything in the world.

I got a taste of this twenty years ago when I married my #Supercoolwife in Buenos Aires. I was shocked at how many bands I'd never heard of when I looked at people's CD collections.

Often, it was the first time in my life I'd met these people, and they'd be cooking asado; music was our first point of connection and contact. On that first trip in Buenos Aires, I ate a lot of asado for lunch and dinner and saw a lot of CDs - everyone had the Beatles and Charly García in their collection.

Because in the UK, Radio One, Kiss FM, and Capital FM only played English-speaking bands when I was growing up.

Oddly enough, no one in Buenos Aires had heard of Derek B or Hue and Cry. 

Same world. Different lens. Different complaints.

And here's something I've noticed: the people in my life who complain about others the most are often those who are the most economically comfortable.

If you're dodging sniper bullets as you queue for food in Gaza, or looking over your shoulder for ICE agents as you walk through your hometown in the USA, you definitely have something to complain about.

But when you're not worried about your phone bill, you have the luxury of being annoyed by other people's choices. When you're not wondering where your next meal comes from, you can spend energy judging how someone else loads the dishwasher.

Economic comfort creates space for petty complaints. It's another version of the salmon problem.

My time in the gap

About ten years ago, I was so deep in depression I couldn't move.

I was stopped. Sunken. Mentally and physically ill-equipped to do anything. For a few years, I had recurring suicidal thoughts and talked about them constantly in therapy.

Sitting in the therapy room, painted mint green with calming beige furniture, it was like an out-of-body experience. Listening to myself say these things. Was that really me?

Part of the person showing up to those sessions was very mentally ill and needed help, another part was a professional victim. And I started to notice a pattern.

In every single damaged relationship—personal, family, friends, business—the common denominator was me.

It wasn't a simple switch flip. Going to therapy helped, and I began practising tapping meditation, where I say a line every morning, something like, "I accept myself and how I feel." When you do that enough times, you start to wake up.

But I do recall wandering around Seven Kings Park one day with a mixture of grief and regret, wondering how many people had noticed this ‘common denominator’ thing as well as me.

The unlearning is harder than finding the realisation.

I did a lot of fucking whining. I have no idea why my supercoolwife didn't quit. It would have been more pleasant for her to stick her face in a deep-fat fryer every day than listen to my victim shit.

With the help of therapy and coaches, I had to do the hard work of separating two very different things.

One was the whining. The learned pattern of victimhood, the belief that the world owed me something. This is a story you can choose to rewrite. And you must be prepared to choose to step out of it.

The other was depression. This is trauma.

And let me be absolutely clear, so that everyone reading this—those who carry trauma and those who do not—understands what I believe.

Trauma is a deadly serious thing.

It is not something you just "get over." It is deep-rooted, it is hard to understand, and it is a legitimate battle to navigate the world with that weight.

As I wrote in a piece about my ADHD and dyslexia, much of that struggle isn't a character flaw; it's the exhaustion of constantly trying to bridge the gap between how my brain works and how the world expects it to work.

But, I had to learn to distinguish between them. I had to separate the real, deep-rooted trauma from the learned habit of playing the victim.

One is a wound you must learn to carry. The other is a story you can choose to rewrite.

The elephant in the room

If you want a raw insight into this, listen to the audio version of David Goggins' second book, Never Finished. He interviews his mother, and she talks about the horrific domestic abuse she endured. She is still dealing with it.

Or read Sangeeta Pillai's book, Bad Daughter, where she writes about the trauma of domestic violence and her mother's murder.

I have friends and family who carry deep-rooted trauma. It has taken me years to understand and confront my own.

And it is my trauma.

It's been easier to learn how to sidestep it because I have sat and listened to other people's stories.

It's like being given a bag of crisps and wondering how you'll ever finish it. Then a mother of five sits down next to you with an entire elephant, a pen knife and a cigarette lighter, and she has to cook dinner for all her family.

When you get perspective, you work out where to go. You realise most of your problems are just crisps.

This perspective is vital. It helps you distinguish what is real trauma from what is self-inflicted victimhood. It's the first step in the hard work.

And it is hard work.

The way out of the victim mindset isn't a quick fix. It requires putting in an abnormal amount of effort to develop good listening, communication, and self-awareness skills. It's a conscious, daily practice of choosing the Gain over the Gap.

Stop feeding the fire

Around 2015, when I was still in the thick of it, I was listening to a lot of James Altucher. He talked about a "no-complaint diet."

It sounds like positive-thinking fluff, but it's not.

I believe that the more airtime you give shit things, the stronger they become. Look at politics. Look at toxic online cultures. Talking about the "thing" gives it power.

This is where therapy and coaching are crucial.

When you sit down with a therapist, you have to explain the whole gig. You have to convince them of the context, and why Melanie in accounts is such a fucking witch, and why your mother is driving you mad.

Halfway through, you hear yourself, and the story loses its steam. You realise how much energy you are haemorrhaging.

But when you sit down with your mate and bitch, it feels good. You fan the flames like a Californian wildfire. And the effect is just as devastating.

You create a toxic culture of complaining. And by the way—no one fucking cares. They don't even remember.

The best advice is no advice

Another pro-tip came from my mate Jeannine. Don't offer advice unless you are asked for it.

Most people, including me, don't take advice until we decide for ourselves. And pretending to ask for advice when you just want to vent is a waste of everyone's time.

I have loads of people I help, and I love helping them, but it is with consent. I've posted hours of videos, blogs, and podcasts online. It's "on-demand Bernie." It's quicker for you and for me.

If someone calls and explicitly says, "Can you help me?" I will.

But now, I don't listen to offer advice. I just listen. Sometimes, I'm quiet for ten minutes in a conversation.

But I have to make myself stay quiet, and even harder is making myself listen.

For example, if someone says "I have a hat", I have to stop myself from saying something like:
"I have a hat too, and my son has a hat, and he got that hat from David, who had dinner with Arsène Wenger once."

By saying that, I'm thinking I am building a connection.

But I'm not.

And I am not listening because I am thinking about what to say, and also, I am accidentally upstaging your story.

So I keep quiet and listen.

Learning how to communicate is the most critical skill in relationship building, and I struggle with it. Even after writing this, I still will misread a room, live in my head, and follow my own agenda that I have not shared with anyone else.

I have so much more time now. I'm not offering solutions, hacks, quick fixes, or throw-away life tips.

And because I haven't given any advice, I'm not fucked off when they don't take it. And I'm not fucked off when they take it, it works, and they forget to credit me or send me two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen in Paris.

The quiet builders

I think about my parents a lot these days.

They were both lifelong participants in the local church. My mother was a teacher in the local school and a catechist in church. My father played the organ every Sunday, usually twice.

They were in it. They looked for ways to keep it going.

They didn't nominate themselves for Nobel Peace Prizes. They didn't build foundations with their names on them to proclaim their great work for society.

They just showed up. Week after week. Year after year.

That's what living in the Gain looks like. It's a quiet, consistent contribution that doesn't require recognition. It's the opposite of victimhood because it's focused on what you can give, not what you're owed.

When action compounds

Last week, Stacey Sheppard, the founder of a coworking space for women in Devon, UK, posted a ‘call to action’ in the LinkedIn coworking group, and it’s also on her Instagram here.

Stacey looked straight down her camera and said what too many of us dance around: the pathway into entrepreneurship already exists, and it's happening every day inside independent coworking spaces.

Not in shiny accelerators. Not in government reports. Right here in the quiet rooms where freelancers swap accountants' numbers, teach each other the ropes, and share the scars that don't make it into LinkedIn highlight reels.

Her point was sharp: as AI displaces millions of jobs, people will turn to entrepreneurship by necessity. And unless we acknowledge the scaffolding that already exists in coworking—the peer mentors, the trust networks, the real-world "how-to" that no policy ever provides—most of those people will fail.

The comments piled in, but here's what struck me: hardly anyone complained.

• Stephen sent the video to Lewisham Council.
• Maria said translators are already losing half their workload to AI.
• Lucy shared how her own business only took off because of her coworking community.
• Emily cut to the heart: coworking is already patching the holes the government leaves.

Here's the reveal you can't unsee: the infrastructure is here. What's missing isn't the pathway—it's the recognition. Policymakers continue to pretend they need to invent solutions, while the answers sit under their feet in local coworking spaces.

And here's where it connects back to us: Stacey didn't just sigh about the unfairness of it all. She acted. She made something public, tangible, useful.

That's the difference between presence and complaint.

Every day, we get offered some form of a red or blue pill moment. I can either walk around whining or attempt to walk the path of healing myself. Let me tell you, whining is much easier.

However, throughout my time in the coworking movement, I am aware that there are many people seeking to build upon existing solutions.

Many people write about challenging the status quo; however, few are willing to go through the pain of actually doing it.

Stacey went through that pain barrier. She didn't just complain about the problem - she made the problem visible.

Because action compounds. Complaints divide. And when we act together, the magic starts.

I don't have time to listen to your whining shit. And you don't have time to keep saying it.

Do The Work

I'm not going to give you a tidy, five-step plan. The work is messier than that.

But it starts with a choice.

The choice to stop feeding the fire of your own complaints. The choice to stop fanning the flames of victimhood.

Here's what shifted everything for me: The No-Complaint Diet.

Back in 2015, for one day, I stopped complaining. Not out loud, not in my head.

When I felt the urge—and I did—I just noticed it. I noticed what triggered it. Was it a real problem, or was it just the salty salmon? Was it deep-rooted trauma, or was it the learned comfort of the Gap?

This isn't about "positive thinking." It's about building ongoing self-awareness to know the difference.

It's about taking the energy you haemorrhage on whining and investing it back into yourself. Into listening better. Into communicating more clearly. Into finally dealing with the things that actually matter.

And here's a simple filter for everything you're about to say: Does this add love and positivity to the world, or does it add negativity?

Most complaints fail that test. Most trauma conversations pass it.

Because your trauma deserves your attention. Your victimhood does not.

What if you tried it for just one day? See what you notice.

BERNIE'S PICKS

📚 Book: The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. This is the framework I mentioned earlier - measuring your progress against where you started, not against some impossible ideal. Simple language for the difference between feeling frustrated (the Gap) and feeling accomplished (the Gain).

Read it. It will save you years of pointless frustration.

🎧 Podcast: "The Messy Spaces Where Magic Happens" with David Walker. What happens when coworking's original ethos meets glass walls and sit-stand desks? David argues that messy, hurricane-hit spaces foster better collaboration than pristine environments.

🛠️ Tool: TextExpander. I've used it for years, and now that so much of my work involves AI prompts for research, show notes, fact-checking, and outlining, I have all my prompts saved as shortcuts. It's not flashy, but it saves HOURS.

🌍 Free Resource: Rest of World. Why "Rest of World"? It's a corporate catchall term used in the West to designate "everyone else." This publication covers tech and culture stories from everywhere that isn't the US or Europe.

💬 Community: The LinkedIn Coworking Group has had more conversations than ever this month. People are growing the conversations around podcasts, including those by Fanny, Caleb, Suzanne, and Helga, as well as the big chat with Stacey that I mentioned. Join us here.

Thank you for your time and attention today - that was a big one!

Bernie 💚🍉

p.s. - Listen and read with us twice a week on the Coworking Values Podcast.