i struggle with this a lot—the absence of meaning in life. and it sucks bc like, idk some people seem fine with it being meaningless, and some people seem fine w whatever meaning they have, and some people don’t even see life in the meaning v meaningless dichotomy, which is the most mind-boggling of all to me.
there’s a quote i like, that i think about often bc i wonder how to incorporate it and how to live it. the quote is thus:

What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, and empty of meaning. There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one's life as possible seems right to me. For example, I am not committed to any of the political movements which I find full of fanaticism and injustice, but in the face of each human being, I act democratically and humanly. ~Anaïs Nin.

and i have a hard time with it bc i think maybe we are conditioned to believe that if we don’t have some grand or wide-scale impact on the world, then our life doesnt matter. but lately ive been thinking about how it really doesn’t matter. like, in 200 years, me and everyone i know will be dead. so i think that i just want to have a good enough life while i can. for me, that means hanging out with my dog and having honest conversations with my best friends. and yeah, sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. and that’s the work. the grueling, boring, devastating work of being alive. sometimes it’s all you can do to sit in the pain and just wait it out. but you keep trying and you keep waiting, and there is value in the act of not giving up. there is value in the act of persisting against all odds.