Life has the meaning you choose to give it.

It’s whatever you decide it to be. You are right - nothing matters in reality, but you can assign importance to things yourselves and as you said “amuse yourself to death”.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced

Life has no inherent meaning. It doesn’t need one. That doesn’t make it pointless either. These judgments are human constructs, not qualities of life itself.

But if someone needs a meaning in life:
The meaning of life is to give your life meaning.

Find it yourself. What feels important to you? What makes you unhappy? What makes you happy?

I tend to be on the empathetic side. I feel a lot of pain and desperation about the state of the world, and the way we humans treat one another so cruelly. That’s why I am trying to find my own way to contribute, so that life, for us and those who follow, becomes permanently better.

Everything is meaningless, nothing matters. Therefore whatever you decide is important is all that matters.

You can look up optimistic nihilism if you want

Well, if you’re feeling philosophical I think you’d first need to address your presupposition that life has or is meant to have any meaning whatsoever.

Like, according to who? And how did they determine that? Would you be sad if it turns out there isn’t any underlying meaning?

At a macro level, it’s the preservation of our species. On a micro level, it whatever makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others (because that would conflict with macro).

the bad news: there is no inherent meaning. the good news: this means you get to create your own. each of us do! the harsh reality is we exist against our will. nobody chose to be here and the “purpose” appears purposeless. if you ask me, there is no such thing as destiny and there is no afterlife for a soul to ascend to, so the existence you are experiencing here on Earth is profoundly unique and should be treated as your one and only. you might spend your entire life searching for a grand meaning, but the saerch is part of the discovery, because along the way you are progressing as a person, and aging and maturing through life, so you’re not remaining stagnant and unchanging. it’s okay if you never truly “know” who you are or where you’re going–just keep doing it. you’ll end up somewhere, you’ll become someone.

That’s the beauty. Given that there is no goal, you are able to define your own.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning

Hedonic threadmill: it’s the theory that we tend to a baseline level of happiness and on average, after some time, people who have won the lottery are as happy (or unhappy) as people who have gone bankrupt.

Look at us, we are apes, barely out of trees. We were fighting predators and cold and diseases that no longer exist. Just by being alive, we are the winners of millions of years of genetic lottery, through evolution, fights, love and ingenuity.

We have access to most of human knowledge through devices that fit in our pockets, can visit other countries that were legendary to our forefathers, instead of hunting wild beasts we have satellites that guide us step by step to the nearest McDonald’s.

Imagine time-traveling a few generations back, describing our life to our grand-grandparents, seeing their eyes grow wide. Now imagine, at the end, telling them how ennui got to us and we can no longer find meaning in our life.

pet cats

Man, could you imagine if there was a single meaning to life? That would be miserable. Every single action you do would have to be for fulfilling that one single purpose and if you were doing anything else you’d be failing. Want to play video games? You’re not fulfilling The Purpose. Eating, sleeping, taking a shit, sure, it’s to keep you going for The Purpose, but it’s also failing to work on it in that moment. Taking a vacation would be blasphemous.

Meaning is something applied to things better by people, and I think I prefer it that way.

TBH, yeah, that’s what I consider the point of my life - amusing myself until death. Whatever I do will not matter in 100, 1000 or 1000000 years which is all just a blip in the scale of the universe. So basically, I’m just trying to have fun and help other people have fun. Of course I realize that I’m incredibly privileged to live a life where I don’t have to worry about too much and I can think about fun and not surviving. I experienced difficult periods in my life and the answer to this question was much, much harder back then.

There’s no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There’s no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.

We’re also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.

And IMO that’s extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you’re here, don’t worry about the far future because it doesn’t matter.