If there is a single question taken to be the ultimate question, it is what is the meaning of life? The answer is: The meaning of your life is the meaning you give it; it consists in what you create the through the identification of pursuit of endeavors that your talents fit you for and your interests draw you to, together with the relationships you form in the process. First and foremost, good relationships give meaning to life; so does the pursuit of worthwhile goals; so do pleasure and enjoyment; so do respect and friendship, both given and received in the course of endeavor. life can thus be very rich in meaning, and not uncommonly is so. This answer is much more complicated than its breezy certainty and simplicity make it look.
First, there is not one thing, a one-size-fits-all thing, that is “the meaning of life”. People are various, life is various, circumstances differ; there are many ways that life can be good, flourishing and meaningful, just as there are many causes of misery and failure, despair and tragedy. Luck, and things beyond and individual’s control, most certainly have their place in determining the character of life, and all lives encounter difficulties of some kind. But meaning is something that incorporates these things too, and the way they are faced and borne.
A few seemingly fortunate individuals might have all the good thing sin the world handed to them on a plate, and might be so constituted that they do not mind being the passive and merely lucky recipients of them, their own merits or activity having no part in the case; and they might accordingly be happy about. or even just comfortably indifferent to, this latter facts. Is theirs a meaningful life? At least one thing it is natural to think is that an individually meaningful life is a product of activity and choice; that it is the agent’s own work.
One thing is for sure: telling people that the meaning of life is what they make of it is always going to seem, at first, unhelpful. To say that meaning is made, not given, and that it is as various as the individuals willing to make it, presents meaning as hard work, not least because the business of thinking seriously about what is good, what is valueable, what one’s own talents for the good are and what one should do with them, is exactly what people did not want to engage in: they want the sages, the poets or the priests to tell them. And when they are told that it is love, or work, or having worthwhile goals, these generalities seem as vague as the formula “meaning is what you make it”, and no less unsatisfying. But - they are also no less true.
Note, though, the interesting nuances that enter when one finally accepts the challenge to think for oneself about what would make one’s own life meaningful. For example, is it achievement in some field, or is it the sincere effort to achieve? Will life be meaning less if one strove to do or to make something worthwhile, but did not realize that aim, or only partially realized it? Well: consider what you think of your friends. Do you honor them for what they would like to succeed at, or only for their actual successes? There you have your answer. There are plenty of cliches that will do the work of this insight: “it is not the arrival but the journey that matters”.
The proper question is not “what is the meaning of life?”, but “what is the meaning that, my various doings and interests, my hopes and my desires, I am or should be creating for my life?” Trying to answer it is itself part of life’s meaning.
