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.

Modernity, she claims, is not about being contemporary or cutting edge, nor is it about technology or science. Through a series of thought experiments, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira compels us to truly face the enormity of planetary crises as well as the seemingly benign ways we are complicit in them. It does not suggest that we become Buddhists or socialists or Scientologists or indeed any type of “ism” to solve our problems. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers.

By allowing modernity to expire gracefully within us, without judgement for its manifest failings, we halt its programme of violence and separation and open the space to reclaim a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. 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 a book of acute vision and insight, and taps into that most underused faculty we so desperately need to attend to ‘the end of the world as we know it’: the imagination.

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The book “ Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism” was published in September 2021.

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. 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. 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. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.

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