This chapter, Top Ten Hallucinations of Modernity, is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Compassion and Accountability (to be released in August 2025).
Modernity often presents itself as the natural order of things, making its assumptions feel inevitable and invisible. This chapter invites readers to slow down and examine the patterns that modernity has normalized and that we have internalized through modernity’s incentives, patterns like separability, infinite growth, and the pursuit of mastery and certainty.
Rather than offering critiques from a distance, Top Ten Hallucinations of Modernity proposes a grounded, self-reflexive process for noticing how these habits of thought live within and around us. It offers an invitation to begin loosening their grip, not through quick solutions, but through careful attention to paradoxes, inescapable systemic and historical complicity in harm, and a willingness to sit with discomfort and stay with the trouble.
This is steady work. It is not about rushing toward solutions but about building the capacity to accompany oneself and others through uncertainty, complexity, and change.
Engaging with these hallucinations prepares the ground for a different kind of practice, one we call WormWork. Rather than striving for purity, progress, or prestige, WormWork is an invitation into practices of composting, metabolizing, and accountable stumbling at the end of the world as we know it. It asks how we stay present, how we hold paradox, and how we co-sense and co-struggle without collapsing into fear, domination, or despair.
We invite you to begin here—with patience, humility, and the understanding that you are not alone in the work of outgrowing what no longer serves life.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 