Human life can be compared to the universe. It has a random purposeless existence. It has no aim. It just exists, sometimes evolves, not at all in a hurry. There is no meaning. Mostly accidents than choices.
Humans are the only living beings who think about purpose in life. Rest of animals live in the present moment. They do not regret about past or hold anxieties about future. We think, read, watch and imagine. We build narratives in our mind. We create stories of how a meaningful life should be like. Actually, there is no meaning in life. It is mere biological existence. It has only one purpose, to transfer the genes to next generation. That way genes are selfish, they are using your body a medium to transfer genes. So we are transferring a set of genetic codes to a new life. Our purpose is over.
As we advanced our intellectual and spiritual capabilities of our brain, we succeeded in creating narratives about our higher self, positioning ourselves as a civilized being than animals. We gradually developed a cultural memory, a growing sense of history and imagining future. Animals do not know this business.
Meaning of life is purely a narrative created by humans especially in last 10,000 years. Till then, there was only hunger, survival, fear, greed, sex, reproduction, disease and death. When we moved from a hunter-gatherer civilization to an agrarian set up, we started getting time to think about tomorrow. Because harvests don’t happen every day, unlike hunting. So the concept of tomorrow began the movement called the meaning of life.
This blog post is originally written as an answer in Quora.