Life exists, here on Earth even if nowhere else, because it can! It is reasonable to assume that Planet Earth being what and where it is, the evolution of life here was basically inevitable. Following that view, the evolution of conscious awareness, given enough time, was also inevitable here on Earth, barring accidents of course. We humans seek meaning because we each and all live within, through, and by means of, a description of the world. For each of us individually one’s mind is the model of our universe which we have learned so far, ie since the day we came, yelling and ignorant, into the world. One’s consciousness, rememberable awareness I call it, is what it is like to be the updating of one’s own model of self in the world, a system which is needed for navigation.
Meaning, in light of this, is one’s gut perception of how things relate to oneself. Of course as social beings our relationships with others are particularly important, indeed vital for survival and sustainable thriving. But also the relationships of us to the rest of the universe are becoming increasingly relevant as our species gains ever more knowledge about the workings of the natural world due to the application of modern scientific method.
The bottom line is you have to decide for yourself what is meaningful to you, because your are who you are, not who I am, As I see it, each one of us is an instance of the universe looking at itself from a particular point of view. To me, the amazing nature of it all is gobsmackingly awesome.
But here is something to ponder:
One essential feature of how human beings originally saw themselves, based on what indigenous Australians tell us about how their people lived before the white man’s holocaust hit them in 1788, was as custodians of the country they lived on. “Looking after country” is the expression that is always used as English translation of their purpose on Earth. And they had been doing that for upwards of 60,000 years!
To put that in a Eurasian mythological (or dreamtime) context, the “Garden of Eden” was surviving and thriving in what we now call Australia right up until 1788 in the east of the continent, and up until 1829 in the west!I think we have to retrieve a big part of that understanding of responsibility for the well being of the land and ocean, ie the ecological communities which we share this planet with and upon whose survival and integrity our own survival depends absolutely!
Optimistic realism 