Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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It is thinking that polluting a river is okay because the human concept of profit is more important than the life of a waterway. For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

It’s a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under conditions of complexity. Rather, we should recognise that modernity is expiring, that it no longer has anything to offer and that we must move it to the hospice where it can gracefully die. 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. 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. Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking. She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers.

This is an outstanding book—truly original and profoundly perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its pedagogic approach. The author puts it beautifully but bluntly: she lovingly does not care about ‘what’ you think: your delusions of ends and means and your sense of self-importance are part of the problem.She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet. 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. Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. 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.

The future for humanity is uncertain, but knowing who we really are and where we came from at least gives us a chance to build a kinder, more beautiful world. It is fitting that the author is someone who genuinely has a foot outside of the tent of modernity and can bring a unique perspective to its study. It reaches deep inside us, filtering our view of the world, deciding what is possible and what is not, severing links with ancient wisdom and the diversity of human experience. Half-serious warning: don't read it if you are seeking clear-cut answers, easy solutions or self-validation.Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of fieldwork that connects the very sense of who ‘we’ are with global legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought. Modernity, she claims, is not about being contemporary or cutting edge, nor is it about technology or science. Written in a tone that directly addresses the reader through stories, metaphors, and rich imagery, this book resonates with the vitality of life itself, taking us on a transformative educational journey that inspires us to take seriously our profound interconnection to all others—past, present, and future—with whom we share this world.

This produces a unique intellectual practice, full of fresh insight and ideas with the power to challenge her readers. Hospicing Modernity is a troubling gift in a big cultural moment, and I’m delighted to have encountered it.

This is not strictly an academic book, but an educational experiment full of dancing stories, metaphors, allegories, creative maps, and exercises that ask you to sit at the limits of our modern desires and imagination. The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist differently and, put frankly, to grow up. She asks us to imagine a future that is free of the cruel constraints of modernity and then pass through modernity’s death to embrace that future. Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance.