Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse With Accountability and Compassion

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, this book asks how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse.

Climate collapse, social crisis, and the decline of modernity rooted in colonialism and capitalism have ushered in an urgent new era. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira helps us face the logics of modernity’s expiration, exploring how neuro-colonization—an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine and adapt—blocks our capacity to build community and embrace complexity.

This book invites us to interrupt five lies that neuro-colonization instills in us (such as entitlements to self-righteous authority, unaccountable autonomy, and the accumulation of capital) and instead cultivate four capacities necessary for survival: sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.

“Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is one of the wisest minds on this planet… She frames a roadmap, at once prophetic and intricate, toward a generative future for our species, in kinship with every form of life and intelligence—including a truly original proposal of relationship with technology and AI.” — Krista Tippett

“If the status quo was as intelligent and as responsive as its popular portrayals, it should designate this book contraband—which is why I most heartily recommend it.” — Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD