描述
What happens when we stop accepting the unacceptable?
As acclaimed activist Clover Hogan stood in front of a room of industry titans assembled to receive awards for their so-called ‘climate leadership’, she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream. In this room, they celebrated over glasses of champagne. Outside it, they were responsible for destroying ecosystems, exploiting workforces and driving humanity to the brink of climate collapse.
In The End of Pretending, Clover argues that most people can feel that something is wrong: democracy is eroding, wealth is pooling in fewer hands and climate change is no longer a distant threat. Yet there is a machinery designed to keep us numb, distracted and overwhelmed.
Few people have lived the cognitive dissonance of our time so intimately. Clover was just eleven when she announced over dinner that she wanted to be a climate activist. That quest led her onto world stages, before heads of state and through the doors of the world’s biggest corporations. It also put her in the firing line of the rich and powerful: from being booed by business leaders to being turned into a viral meme by Elon Musk.
Now, with raw vulnerability and dark humour, Clover explores how social media turns outrage into currency and how accountability is misdirected into individual responsibility. She names the dismissal of the concerns of young people as intergenerational gaslighting and calls out performative pain. But she also offers a way out: how to face what’s broken, refuse the script and find our power in each other.
A searing critique of our times, The End of Pretending asks who benefits from us feeling powerless – and what happens when enough of us stop playing along.