Hospicing Modernity

Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

By: Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Narrated by: Dougald Hine, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

For fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, a book about facing the multiple crises of modernity--and hospicing modernity--with maturity, humility, and integrity.

This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?

Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance--the do-gooder who does "good enough," then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker--and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back...and why it's time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:

• Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
• Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
• Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
• Understand the "5 modern-colonial e's": Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
• Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
• Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness

For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Charles Eisenstein, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

Be ready

Not for everyone, but for those willing to make the effort, necessary. Deep gratitude to Vanessa for this work.

Critically important to read

Given the impending end of Modernity, this book gives us a way to face it personally and collectively.

The complexity and challenges ahead

This book is a sobering read that I can identify with. Knowing that I am not alone in this thinking offers some comfort, although knowing that there are only two options is an uncomfortable truth. I am committed to doing what I can to avoid the ultimate destruction of human kind.

Life changing

This book has reoriented much of how I think, look, feel and lean into the world. This is a crucial and very difficult read for a complicit aspiring change maker based in the global north. Incredibly moving. Read it.

Riveting

A very strong and honest look at where we are now as a global society that stimulates thought rather than offering a packaged solution to the dilemma we face on earth