Hospicing Modernity: Unlearning the World We Inherited

This article relies heavily on my use of ChatGPT.

Hospicing Modernity: Unlearning the World as We Know It

As the world faces overlapping ecological, social, and spiritual crises, how might we respond—with panic or denial; or with depth, care, and attention? This piece explores Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s invitation to “hospice modernity,” weaving her work together with other thinkers to imagine more ethical and grounded ways of being in a collapsing world.

Hospicing Modernity: A New Metaphor for Collapse

In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, offers a provocative and timely metaphor for our moment in history. She suggests that we are not merely facing a crisis that can be resolved with better systems or smarter strategies, but rather the death of a world. For those living in the Global North, this means confronting the decline of the very structures—economic, political, epistemological—that have long sustained modern ways of life. These structures promise progress, mastery, and stability, but are rooted in colonialism, extraction, and exclusion. Rather than attempting to fix or save what is unraveling, Machado de Oliveira proposes that we “hospice” modernity. Like end-of-life care, this involves witnessing, grieving, and attending to the slow death of systems that cannot and should not be rescued, while remaining open to what might emerge in their absence.

Reading with Bauman, Morton, and Malm

This invitation to hospice modernity complicates conventional responses to crisis. Take Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist and professor at the University of Leeds, whose diagnosis of “liquid modernity” describes how formerly stable social institutions and identities have dissolved into fluid, uncertain, and often isolating forms of life. While Bauman mourns the loss of solidity and clarity, Machado de Oliveira questions whether that solidity was ever just or sustainable to begin with. For her, the precarity of our time is not simply a sociological shift, but an ontological opportunity: a moment to unlearn the habits of categorization, control, and certainty that have upheld modernity’s false promises. Bauman’s later work on the “sociology of ambivalence,” which critiques the violence embedded in modernity’s drive to eliminate ambiguity, echoes this call to dwell more responsibly with complexity.

This willingness to remain with the unresolvable also resonates with Timothy Morton, a professor of English at Rice University, and his concept of hyperobjects—massive phenomena like climate change or nuclear radiation that are so distributed in time and space that they defy human comprehension. Morton describes these realities as destabilizing, demanding new modes of perception and humility. Machado de Oliveira affirms this need for humility, but deepens it by anchoring it in historical and relational contexts. Where Morton leans toward ontological abstraction, she insists on rooting disorientation in the lived legacies of colonization and dispossession. Hyperobjects may challenge our minds, but they also demand that we reckon with whose worlds have already been undone.

If Morton and Bauman invite a more contemplative orientation to crisis, Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, represents a more confrontational one. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm argues that the climate crisis requires urgent, disruptive action—including the sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure—because mainstream environmentalism has failed to stop the destruction. Machado de Oliveira shares his sense of urgency, but diverges sharply in tone and orientation. She cautions that even militant responses can reproduce the very logics of modernity they oppose: the belief in control, clarity of enemy, and the righteousness of intervention. Instead, she invites a slower, more intimate reckoning with the conditions that created the crisis in the first place. Her refusal to offer solutions is itself a kind of resistance, aimed not at infrastructure, but at the modern psyche’s desire to fix, master, and redeem.

Meaning, Attention, and Inner Transformation

John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Toronto, offers yet another perspective through his work on the contemporary meaning crisis. Drawing from cognitive science, ancient philosophy, and psychology, Vervaeke argues that modern societies have lost the capacity to generate meaning, resulting in widespread alienation and nihilism. His proposed “ecology of practices”—including mindfulness, dialogical reflection, and transformative learning—seeks to renew our ability to connect with ourselves, others, and the world. Machado de Oliveira aligns with Vervaeke in recognizing the need for inner transformation, but she warns that even the search for meaning can replicate colonial patterns if it avoids the discomfort of unlearning. Where Vervaeke moves toward reconstruction, she leans into dissolution. Both, however, agree that something deeper than new information is needed: a transformation of being.

This emphasis on attention and presence creates a natural bridge to the work of Jenny Odell, an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford University, whose writing offers a gentle but firm grounding for this kind of transformation. In How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, she critiques the ways in which capitalist time and the attention economy erode our ability to relate meaningfully to ourselves and our surroundings. Odell encourages a reorientation toward slowness, attention, and presence—a quiet form of resistance that prepares the ground for the kind of hospicing Machado de Oliveira describes. Odell does not frame her work in explicitly decolonial terms, but her invitation to withdraw from productivity-driven life resonates with Machado de Oliveira’s call to refuse the rhythms of modernity. Both authors suggest that refusing to be swept along by urgency can open space for relational, situated, and unexpected forms of change.

What Might Ethical Response Look Like?

What, then, might a responsible citizen encountering these ideas do in response to all this—especially as someone embedded in the privileges and complicities of the Global North? Machado de Oliveira resists the impulse to prescribe action. Instead, she gestures toward practices of humility, discernment, and ethical presence. This might mean turning toward Indigenous voices, not to extract wisdom, but to listen and learn in accountable ways. It might mean cultivating the capacity to grieve what is being lost, without rushing to rebuild. Here, Buddhist philosophy offers a helpful complement: the practice of non-attachment, not as withdrawal but as a deep letting go of the illusion of control and permanence. To live in this way is to embrace impermanence and interdependence not as abstract ideas, but as daily practices. Bauman’s sociology of ambivalence reminds us that the modern desire to eliminate ambiguity often results in greater violence. By contrast, to hospice modernity is to stay with the ambiguity—to let it transform us—and to hold space for what cannot yet be named.

References

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press.

Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Polity Press.

Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books.

Malm, A. (2021). How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Verso Books.

Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

Odell, J. (2019). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House.

Odell, J. (2023). Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Random House.

Vervaeke, J. (2022). Awakening from the Meaning Crisis [Lecture Series]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke