Eric Scheske's Outside Modern Limits: Modernity's Decline

The Left Hemisphere has Ruined Our Soil

Eric Scheske — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:30:40 GMT

If your gut’s hurtin’ you, blame the Green Revolution.

No, not the idiocy that has polluted every decent plot of land with solar panels that will be left to rust after the tenant tax-credit bandits leave them behind for the farmer to dispose of pursuant to an onerous double-hazmat process that is impossible to comply with unless the farmer hires his Sena…

Third Way Mania: A Revolt Against the Binary Brain?

Eric Scheske — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:37:50 GMT

This modern world’s got a fever, and it ain’t for more cowbell.

It’s for third alternatives.

Everybody’s itching for that elusive other option, like it’s the last ticket out of a burning city. Ray Oldenburg lit a fuse back in ’89 with The Great Good Place, preaching the gospel of “third spaces”: not the soul-crushing office, not the stifling classroom, b…

Four Utopian Reformers

Eric Scheske — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:20:10 GMT

I had a chance last month to booze it up at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, but by the time I came across it, I’d already guzzled enough gin to fill a Prohibition-era bathtub, so I skipped it.

Bad on me. Sloppy Joe’s was Hemingway’s haunt in the 1930s, back when he was a strutting, liquor-soaked peacock, high on daiquiris and his literary success, years remov…

Jack Kerouac: The Tao on Steroids

Eric Scheske — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:26:00 GMT

He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954.

But in the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.

He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s.

But he detested the 1960s cou…

Albert Camus Knew the Left Hemisphere was Missing Something Crucial

Eric Scheske — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:55:00 GMT

If Jean-Paul Sartre was wildly popular, his younger friend, Albert Camus, was wildly cool.

Sartre was ugly; Camus, handsome. Sartre loved women; women loved Camus. Sartre was kind of a dick. Camus was cool.

And though Sartre’s writings were hugely popular immediately after World War II, they were soon eclipsed in popularity by Camus’ novels and essays, wh…

Modern Existentialism is the Rejection of Modernity’s Extreme Essentialism

Eric Scheske — Mon, 22 May 2023 12:49:39 GMT

Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

Modernity is rejection of the Tao (the "Great Rejection"). Existentialist movements throughout the past 200 years have rejected the rejection . . . and proven wildly popular.

September, 1945. Paris.

Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends started a new journal, The Modern Times, which challenged writers to commit to action.

Short…

Jacques Derrida Dismantles Modernity

Eric Scheske — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 10:33:15 GMT

The World of Meditation is Here

Eric Scheske — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 21:02:55 GMT

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

Get ready for “Six-Minute Hesychasm” and “How to Get as Mentally Jacked as Jack Kornfield”

So why am I excited about the surge in meditation?

Because I believe it’s the first time since the dawn of modern science that the scientist has been humiliated.

Listen to that Joe Rogan interview with Amishi Jha. At the beginning, sh…