The implied meaning of “life is meaningless” is “there is no grand universe-encompassing [Christian] narrative to ascribe to”. Because the literal interpretation isn’t true. We’re making meaning right now. Every social interaction or relation is a meaning-making machine.

I think the problem for those of us that struggle with this is the way our society instills in us the idea of a grand externality or objectivity, usually through religion but not necessarily. So we may try to step beyond our religion or whatever grand narrative, but the architecture of our mind is still organized around it, like there’s just a void where there used to be meaning. Our consciousness is still oriented around a false expectation of some universal truth.

But this form of pure objectivity doesn’t exist.

The way I usually see people approach existentialism is a pendulum swing into pure subjectivity, a retraction into the self, “you create your own meaning”. But this isn’t any more true than a grand objectivity (and can be more harmful).

What we have is a network of overlapping subjectivities. The making of meaning is a dynamic process that takes place in each intersubjective space, so meaning exists locally to wherever it is produced. There’s meaning between you and a friend, a shared understanding of certain aspects of the world. There’s meaning within your culture or at your job or among people with similar interests.

Importantly, there’s meaning between you and the media you consume, between you and the larger cultural narrative, which is dominated by bourgeois subjectivity (often disguised as universal objectivity). This is another way we might feel alienated from meaning, because the dominant social meaning is discordant with the meaning we’re producing locally. As a class without consciousness, without organs, we struggle to create meaning that aligns with our reality.