The inevitable is coming fast. We know it in our bones—and it’s past time to face it. The highly anticipated follow-up to Hospicing Modernity: how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse—includes reflections, exercises, and promptsClimate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era. Hospicing Modernity asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. Outgrowing Modernity helps us make sense of where we’re going—and deepen what’s possible—in a time of endings.Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as neurocolonization: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up—even when our existence demands it.This book invites you to interrupt 5 lies that neurocolonization instills in us—beliefs (and behaviors) that have condition us to think we’re owed the following, regardless of others or the planet:Moral and epistemic self-righteous authorityUnrestricted, unaccountable autonomyArbitrating truth, law, and common senseAffirming one's virtues, innocence, and purityExploitative appropriation and accumulation of various forms of capitalIn moving away from these ingrained worldviews, we can choose instead to develop 4 capacities necessary to our—and Earth’s—survival: sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.Machado De Oliveira moves beyond critique into a praxis of strategic disinvestment: one that invites us to recognize what no longer serves us and reinvest in nurturing structures and lifeways that restore our knowledge in the value of life for life’s sake.

A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity—for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity 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 Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

The inevitable is coming fast. We know it in our bones—and it’s past time to face it. The highly anticipated follow-up to Hospicing Modernity: how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse—includes reflections, exercises, and promptsClimate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era. Hospicing Modernity asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. Outgrowing Modernity helps us make sense of where we’re going—and deepen what’s possible—in a time of endings.Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as neurocolonization: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up—even when our existence demands it.This book invites you to interrupt 5 lies that neurocolonization instills in us—beliefs (and behaviors) that have condition us to think we’re owed the following, regardless of others or the planet:Moral and epistemic self-righteous authorityUnrestricted, unaccountable autonomyArbitrating truth, law, and common senseAffirming one's virtues, innocence, and purityExploitative appropriation and accumulation of various forms of capitalIn moving away from these ingrained worldviews, we can choose instead to develop 4 capacities necessary to our—and Earth’s—survival: sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.Machado De Oliveira moves beyond critique into a praxis of strategic disinvestment: one that invites us to recognize what no longer serves us and reinvest in nurturing structures and lifeways that restore our knowledge in the value of life for life’s sake.

A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity—for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity 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 Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.