I've absolutely no doubt there's just an unimaginable amount of life in the universe. Sadly, I also believe that some of it was millions of years before us, and some will be millions of years after us, and the ones at our same brief moment in time and space, so staggeringly far, we'll never meet.

Warning: Pure Speculation Ahead

The universe is 13 billion years old and the road from non-life to us took 4 billion years. Even if you assume the universe's first few billion years were unsuitable for life, this still leaves open the possibility (or inevitability) that species all over the universe reached our level of sapience several billion years before we did. I refuse to believe that 100% of what should be an infinite number just died out.

Extrapolating from our current technological progression, I think it's safe to say that any such civilizations living anywhere remotely close to us already know we're here. Any lack of contact has been already decided on their end. Some attribute this to them being indifferent to something so primitive, but we as humans take interest in life all the way down to one-celled organisms, so I don't agree. I think the lack of contact is enforced for our interest. In a universe full of life, a specie's collective identity (for those that care about such things, like us) becomes a great deal more important. An event like first contact would irreversibly change ours. In essence, they have a Prime Directive.

The only real alternative interpretation to our situation is that the odds against life forming are stacked so high, that a species reaching our level of sapience is something that happens on average only once across the lifespan of the universe within a volume of many billions of galaxies. It also requires that there be no physics loopholes that allow superluminal travel. I don't think the odds of life forming are so ridiculously low (and no ET's and no FTL is just no fun), so I'm inclined to go with the first interpretation.