Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?

[LadyForCamus]

I know Nudger and Vulc are going to groan at me, but I’m still trying to work out what it even means to say that “life has meaning;” or if that’s even possible.

It is an odd concept, all the more so because "life" is essentially just a sequence of events spanning a lifetime, and the only common factor is the mind of the person experiencing those events.

Life as a whole would therefore have multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings because of our reactions to the different things that have happened to us over the years. We could therefore consider one particular event to be very meaningful, and a thousand others (say, having oatmeal for breakfast this morning) to be completely inconsequential.

Yeah, this is where I lose my sense of direction on the matter. I understand that events mean something to “me”, the experiencer, within the framework of my experience; i.e., I love oatmeal, and so if I eat oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow that means I enjoyed oatmeal and had a pleasurable breakfast. But how do we give meaning to experience itself? To “I”? Some people leverage that experience for its own sake is the meaning, but I just don’t follow. I’m missing something.