David Chapman
@meaningness.bsky.social
I write and podcast at https://meaningness.substack.com/ about: * Understanding meaning, purpose, and culture * Leveling up technical work by going beyond formal rationality * Vajrayana: the life-affirming branch of Buddhism
🆕 You do not have to be someone special to be noble. Nobility can appear in wildly diverse forms—as illustrated in myth, fantasy fiction, and Vajrayana Buddhist practice. You can be noble however is natural for you—not conforming to some socially fixed idea. meaningness.substack.com/p/vajra-prid...
Vajra pride and the diversity of natural nobility
Just as you are, not anything special
meaningness.substack.com
🆕 Nobility in current circumstances depends on an unusual way of perceiving, understanding, and acting. You BECOME the kingdom, and positive visions emerge from your mythic engagement in it. meaningness.substack.com/p/seeing-lik...
Seeing like a Good King
Vision for nobility in an era of chaotic decline and unexpected possibilities
meaningness.substack.com
࿇ 📺 @petermcewen.bsky.social and I will co-lead a zoom discussion / Q&A on deity yoga, relational yogas, and the nebulosity of identity: Sunday the 20th (weekend after this coming one). Register here! lu.ma/22iop35g (Peter is very scary but fortunately for you I am a girl. Tea will be served!)
David Chapman + Peter McEwen · Zoom · Luma
David Chapman and Peter McEwen will be in open conversation about deity yoga, relational yogas, and the (potential) collapse of fixed identity. David writes at…
lu.ma
🆕🎙️ New podcast with @jimrutt.bsky.social! We discussed All The Things—honor, courage, confidence, dignity, decency, and magnificence for example—and had a lot of fun. www.jimruttshow.com/david-chapman/
EP 308 David Chapman on Rethinking Nobility - The Jim Rutt Show
Jim talks with David Chapman about rethinking nobility for the modern age through his recent “nobility tetralogy” of essays. They discuss character & virtue as “risible” concepts, noblesse oblige & el...
jimruttshow.com
I looked into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories a day and found it was made up by popular author Robert Sapolsky open.substack.com/pub/strandbe...
Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day
A Note on the Production of Facts
open.substack.com
If you're among the 17 million Americans likely to lose your health coverage (like me), now is the time to act. - Deal with any existing health issues you've been putting off while you still have coverage. 1/ www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
At least 17 million Americans would lose insurance under Trump plan
GOP legislation would set back years of progress in expanding health care coverage, unwinding key parts of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
washingtonpost.com
First time a judge has decided a case based on hallucinated case law in the US that I've encountered. caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-cou...
🆕🎙️ New podcast with Charlie Awbery! An unexpected question, and then we work out an answer together. meaningness.substack.com/p/whats-the-...
🆕 Strategies and tactics for overcoming the typical emotional and relationship difficulties faced by software engineers and other STEM-ish people! meaningness.substack.com/p/leveraging...
Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.
A few thoughtfully-chosen excerpts from my "How to be a wise optimist..." essay:
🆕 Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Software engineers have recently gained enormous power—and are not always using it wisely or justly. We can do better—and so can you, regardless of occupation or position. meaningness.substack.com/p/software-e...
Software engineers are eating the world
In ignorance of nobility.
meaningness.substack.com
"Sometimes ritual doesn’t just demand that we hold ourselves in, but instead that we loosen ourselves up."
Will Buckingham@willbuckingham.com · last yr.I spent this afternoon putting together a few thoughts on Confucius, and the art of not being annoying. www.willbuckingham.com/confucius-no...
This essay is about the *teachable* "systematic" part, which is failing in Western Civilization despite being load bearing. If we lack systematically noble/benevolent/good leaders, the future for humans is very dark.
David Chapman@meaningness.bsky.social · last yr.🆕 Nobility is the wise and just use of power. What counts as noble? How did nobility become a myth? What have we lost as a consequence? How will we recover it? meaningness.substack.com/p/ofermod
David Chapman @meaningness.bsky.social provides fascinating insights into meaning and purpose and how it intersects with the personal, to social and the political. He's one of our key thinkers for modern times, and the attached essay provides a fine sample! I encourage all to "like and subscribe!"
David Chapman@meaningness.bsky.social · last yr.🆕 Nobility calls for secular authority to limit the oppressive power of priests and courtiers. When kings fail in that duty, it may fall to churls—or, better, ceorls. I explain the mystery of vice signaling: meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...
I enjoyed this insight, by way of @meaningness.bsky.social (meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...). It seems obvious in retrospect that the people who rise to leadership in any organization will be those who feel greater duty to the organization than to the purpose of the organization.
🆕 Nobility is the wise and just use of power. What counts as noble? How did nobility become a myth? What have we lost as a consequence? How will we recover it? meaningness.substack.com/p/ofermod
Ofermōd
Building a bridge across postmodern nihilism to nobility
meaningness.substack.com
New post: An island of stability in a sea of chaos Zooming in on a patch of white space inside a chaotic image. What's going on in there? https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/05/04/island-of-stability/
🆕 Nobility calls for secular authority to limit the oppressive power of priests and courtiers. When kings fail in that duty, it may fall to churls—or, better, ceorls. I explain the mystery of vice signaling: meaningness.substack.com/p/to-keep-pr...
To keep priests in check: prefer nobility to churlishness
When secular authority fails to restrain virtue experts, vice signaling becomes tempting
meaningness.substack.com
🆕 📺 Checks and balances between secular and religious power often make for functional societies. That isn't working for us now—maybe for the opposite reason than you'd expect? meaningness.substack.com/p/priests-an...
Priests and Kings
The uneasy power balance between two elite classes, justified by virtue and nobility respectively
meaningness.substack.com
I'll always remember the way he'd respond to someone claiming 'I think in my head'. Jeff would retort: "I think in the bath, in my car & sometimes in my office at BU, but I've never thought in my head".
🆕 📺 New video! Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide. Nobility is the proper matter of politics. meaningness.substack.com/p/nobility-a...
Infectious diseases & chronic illness are not as distinct as some people suggest. Getting to the bottom of long COVID could help people with persistent illness after other viral & bacterial infections.
Marc Veldhoen@marcveld.bsky.social · last yr.Some people do not fully recover from an acute viral infection and experience persistent symptoms or incomplete recovery for months or even years. This is not unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and history shows that post-viral conditions like post COVID-19 condition, referred to as LC, are not new 1/7
🆕 📺 New video! A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play. meaningness.substack.com/p/what-is-st...
What is stage five (like)?
Describing the experience, rather than theorizing about mental mechanisms
meaningness.substack.com
🆕 Suffering is never special ࿇ Opening your heart without an anesthetic ࿇ The Buddhist warrior’s path ࿇ Life in a charnel ground ࿇ The point is to cut the enemy: un-seeing ࿇ Gendered Buddhism ࿇ Are you ready to take a vow? meaningness.substack.com/p/living-bea...
Living beautifully † Cutting hard
The vow to cut un-seeing
meaningness.substack.com
This is what it comes down to in terms of how we actually function in society: not “what is a woman?”, but “how do you know I’m a woman?” Nobody has ever asked to inspect my gametes or chromosomes. Presentation is literally all anyone is going on.
Charlotte Lydia Riley@lottelydia.bsky.social · last yr.I mean I’m a fairly femme cis woman but I don’t carry any ID on me that shows my gender. How could I *prove* I am a woman, if I had to, in a way that isn’t just “well she looks like a girl, fair enough”?