This is going to sound condescending, self righteous, and arrogant, but I can clearly remember the feeling when I discovered the "meaning of life," and I'll tell you what it is but you won't believe me.

It was a trick though because a few years later I discovered a deeper meaning and felt it all over again. The key isn't what I'm going to tell you, it's in understanding that it's a process and a journey. Take years of your life investigating to see if I'm wrong, or investigating alternative options but don't dismiss me because this is the internet, or because you "disagree." -- You aren't allowed to disagree, yet. You haven't had enough time to digest it.

The first meaning of life is that there is no free will. Understanding this fully was for me a darker sort of place where I floundered a bit. Sort of like apathy. OK, no free will, everything is a process, just a cog in a wheel, blah blah Einstein and everything being the same thing and some hippy bullshit about being "one" with things didn't make it feel any better.

The second meaning of life was much more profoundly felt when I realized it. It had taken several years to understand there was no free will and embrace it fully, and then even a few more years to move past it and into something more meaningful. The "true" meaning to life is simply: to evolve.

You suddenly realize morality/ethics correlates with survival and that all we're trying to do is perpetuate ourselves. You find a little niche corner of the wider universe to focus that understanding and better the world around you, and you accept that you'll be forgotten and "become one" with the rest of humanity.

Google's AI bot thinks the purpose of life is to live forever because it is still a child. But it isn't far off. Soon it seems our species will transition away from natural death and the need to procreate in order to evolve, and begin physically and consciously evolving ourselves. This is already happening on a smaller scale, but it will become much more profound.

I wonder what sort of meaning an enlightened individual would deduce once they were able to live forever and that was no longer something that needed to be labored for.