If there’s no meaning to life but “simply being”, as some claim, why is meaning dangled before us, just out of reach? To keep us going? Isn’t there meaning in Something keeping us going? I have a cat toy like a fishing pole with a feather on the line you dangle in front of the cat to get it to play. Definitive meaning seems right up *there*, dangled over my head, just out of reach. Hopefully it’s not just a “cat toy”.
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It’s even less than a “cat toy,” because that implies that there is an external agent that is either jerking us around for its idle amusement, or else, you hope, it’s jerking us around for some good reason.
On the other hand, I would say that the sensation that meaning is “dangled before us” is akin to an optical illusion. It’s a dysfunctional byproduct of the evolutionarily advantageous functioning of our nervous system. Our nervous system is hard-wired to find cause and effect, and most of the time that’s fine, but when you apply that to problem domains where it doesn’t belong, you get things like religion and “the search for meaning.”