Living in an expired story
I’m a slow reader, and the things I remember from books tend to be an emotional imprint or a shift in perspective rather than a the specific details of a point or story.
When I read Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira a few years ago, this was the perspective-shifting paragraph that kept circling in my mind:
“We are living off expired or expiring stories. Stories that expire can no longer dance with you. They are lethargic or stuck, they can’t move things in generative ways anymore, but we often feel we cannot let them go.”
It immediately reminded me of the famous Audrey Lord quote, “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house” - in other words, we cannot keep applying the same logic and tools that were used to create our current world and expect it to change in any substantial way.
‘Expired’ then means irrelevant, ineffective, redundant.
Among the expired stories are those of white supremacy culture, which promises that ‘objectivity’ can neutrally assess what’s right or wrong, that measuring things leads to efficiency, that infinite self-improvement leads to happiness and that for something to be credible, it has to be written down.
After reading the book, I kept seeing and feeling these expired stories everywhere.
In my work, this looked like being a part of projects, initiatives, organisations and events that were intending to create something different to the status quo, often led by people with a genuine commitment to shifting dominant structures.
Some of them used ambitious language such as ‘operating as an ecology’, or ‘engaging in ontological shifts’ or ‘cultivating decolonial practices’.
I liked those phrases at first because they pointed to the next horizon. But a contradiction revealed itself almost every time: the tools, practices and strategies used to achieve those goals were firmly rooted in the current paradigm - there was top-down decision-making, secrecy, accounting, individualism, ‘power over’ moves, conflict avoidance, punishment etc.
What struck me was that within most of those projects, it was hard to find flow, alignment and momentum. The discrepancy between the vision and the practice quickly became an experience of drain and dread.
People became cynical or had to expend a lot of energy convincing themselves that what they were doing was genuinely at the forefront of change because they couldn’t feel it in their bodies.
People’s tiredness often stood in stark contrast to the things we were saying. In those cracks lived the question of whether we were capable of leading a ‘paradigm shift’ if we stayed firmly rooted in the current one?
The sense of ‘expiry’ felt palpable.
Image of a concrete stairwell flanked by red brick walls leading down to a locked wooden door, with fern and moss growing on both sides of the wall
The way Hospicing Modernity acknowledged that reality felt like a relief to my system. By stating something that felt so present everywhere but few people were saying out loud, it created space to think about the next move.
I’ve since been thinking about what some of the expired stories are that are still holding sway over us. Here are some that I’ve been coming up against most frequently in my work:
That change happens through force, and through force alone (if we stop pushing, things will fall apart)
That individuals are primarily responsible for the conditions of their lives and can change them if they can muster enough willpower (if you’re suffering, you’re not empowering yourself enough)
That bigger is always better, even if we say we believe in small things (we know the funders will want to see a growth trajectory)
That what’s not recorded isn’t real or worthy of our attention (‘data, data, data’)
That other people’s approval matters more than our inner compass (what are the number of clicks, likes, audience engagement stats?)
That simplicity is always better (if you can’t explain what you’re doing in plain English in 20 seconds, people won’t engage with it)
That progress is linear, and attribution matters a great deal (if you can’t parse out the contribution you made, how do you expect people to support your work?)
That if you’re not measuring your progress, you’re not serious about your work (see all the impact reports out there)
That how you show up to the work is less important than what you produce (doing ‘inner work’ is a luxury at best and a breach of ‘professionalism’ at worst)
In my experience, most people doing change work wouldn’t subscribe to those things. But these stories show up quietly in how we think, behave and react, particularly under pressure.
And it creates a kind of dissonance in our systems that can feel like exhaustion, stagnation, pointlessness or overwhelm.
Synonyms to ‘expiry’ in the dictionary include termination, dissolution and death. Merriam Webster gives this as an example of how the word ‘expiry’ can be used in a sentence:
“The expiry of a great empire is always a cataclysmic event.”
We are certainly seeing cataclysmic levels of destruction in the world around us. It’s devastating, rage-making, heartbreaking to witness.
So many lives have already been taken, and many won’t make it to what comes next. But for those who do, expiry means the end of a shelf life, the death of an era, not the end of the world.
As we are moving this expired energy in our bodies - whether it’s exhaustion, agitation, cynicism, anxiety, numbness, depression and other forms of stuckness - may we pay attention to the moments when something else seeps through.
A moment of surprise, awe, playfulness, solidarity, connection, love, imagination - those are qualities of a new story we get to shape if we find ways to stay alive and awake until past the expiry date of the current one.