A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states.

I'm not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of "enlightenment" came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There's also the issue of "not-self", "non-duality", "impermanence" etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.

in the case of string theory, the fact that it predicts

Hmm, my outsider impression is that there's in fact a myriad "string theories", all of them predicting everything we observe, but with no way to experimentally discern the correct one among them for the foreseeable future, which I have understood to be the main criticism. Is this broad-strokes picture fundamentally mistaken?

“just want to want stuff” does not seem actionable to me

I mean, you already do want all sorts of stuff I imagine. The non-trick is to just figure out which you want more and how capable are you of achieving it.

Duh, but what are some candidate* concrete steps* for constructing these temporary assemblages that aren’t trivial? Isn’t that begging the original question?

Like I said, I don't think I'll be able to help. I'm seemingly lucky enough to never having had significant problems of this sort, and I've been reading him mostly for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. He's active on Substack these days though, so you can try contacting him there for pointers.

And yet Trump-like figures have obtained power outside of the United States as well. I think the demand for Trumpism goes beyond just the personal allure of the man himself, even though that has also been a critical part of uplifting the Republicans’ electoral success.

I'm claiming that Trump mainly channels the protest against the "respectable" elite consensus, and sure, people are fed up with it not only in the US.

Trump has remade the Republican party in his image.

Yep, because it was brain dead already, he pushed and the corpse toppled over. This is a blessing and a curse for the Dems - neither Trump nor anybody else on the right seems likely to offer any positive vision any time soon, so all the Dems have to do is to just be slightly less repulsive, something they impressively managed to bungle twice already!

Has any of this happened?

Yes. They aren't in (complete) power, therefore some of the agenda has been slowed down.

It seems to me the wokeness craze of 2019-2022 was in large part caused by Trump

And Trump in 2016 was in large part caused by what was then called the SJW craze of 2008-2015. So it goes.

Trump obtaining political power doesn’t seem to have made the left or the elites any more sane, in my estimation. Quite the opposite.

Yeah, I'm not optimistic. Maybe benevolent robot overlords will swoop in to the rescue against all odds after all?

please feel free to describe the process how you’ve figured out your current priorities and tradeoffs while banning the word “meaning”

By thinking about what I want and what I'm capable of doing, and reconciling that to the best of my ability. Humans are entities that tend to want stuff, and take actions to achieve some degree of it, and the word "meaning" refers to that general sort of thing.

the gap is in my soul

Well, I probably can't help with that, but I know of somebody who plausibly can. Have you heard of David Chapman's Meaningness? What he writes largely makes sense to me, and he claims that a few people told him they were helped by it, so maybe give it a try?

You haven't addressed by far the most important pro-Trump point - the left is worse and much more dangerous. Yes, Trump is a short-sighted clueless evil bumbling buffoon - therefore only psychopaths and fools could wholeheartedly endorse his vision, and so, unless they could somehow come to dominate the country, Trumpism isn't a long-term concern. Whereas basically the entire "blue tribe" elite endorses wokeness as being the-right-side-of-history continuation of liberal ideals. To the extent that Trump frustrates their "progress" and provides the opportunity for the elite to come to its senses (or be replaced by a not insane one) I say that he's the lesser evil.

This feels like a major sticking point, though. If it does dissipate, then the fact that meditation has a profound effect on your values in a way you likely wouldn't endorse in advance seems like something its promoters should be upfront about.

If it doesn't dissipate, then we're back to the conundrum that the various significant improvements ostensibly acquired through meditation don't appear to translate into unusual efficiency at accomplishing real-world tasks. Money is the unit of caring, after all, so becoming a billionaire is instrumentally convergent even to somebody free of status-seeking and ladder climbing motivational systems. Or, alternatively, becoming a prominent scientist that cures cancer seems like the sort of thing that can cause people to get famous.

Ok, but does the desire to do the greatest good for the greatest number also dissipate?

What's your opinion on the "serious practitioners never seeming to achieve impressive 'worldly' feats at a noticeably higher rate than non-meditators do" issue? Some of the features you listed sure sound like they should be a big help with that, and yet the primary meditator stereotypes seem to still be the layabout hippie and the ethically dubious cult-leader guru.