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What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of me? Am I just here, like you, like all of us, because of luck or circumstance? Could it be that there’s really no greater meaning to this life than two people getting it on and somehow creating a consciousness?

Is this why people believe in God? Is this why people believe in true love? Because they’re searching for something, anything, that indicates they’re more than the stochastic noise of the universe? And, well, if we could meet, and we could fall in love, and we could stay together for decades — that has to count for something, right? There has to be a greater meaning behind that than luck and hard work, doesn’t there?

But what about the people who don’t fall in love? Or who fall in love with someone who’s already in love with someone else? Or who fall in love with a person that hurts them? If love inscribes meaning, what does that mean for the people without it?

And what about the people who have no one to remember them? The people who are born and live and die wrapped entirely in the package of a quiet, mundane life? Did their lives have meaning? Is meaning afforded only to those whose legacy survives them? Is meaning in my knowing their name, or you knowing their name? Is meaning, then, retractable: able to be given and taken away, based on societal celebrity?

What does meaning even mean? Do we need a universal definition? Or does an individual get to decide for themselves if their life has meaning — whether that’s inscribed by God, or love, or hard work, or patrimony? But if everyone decides for themselves, then wouldn’t everyone have meaning? And if everyone has meaning, then what does it mean to be meaningless?