Disclosure: I'm a big time nihilist and genuinely take questions like "does the morality of an action propagate at the speed of light," seriously which i encourage everyone who understands relatively to at least consider for a brief time

I don't really agree with much in this post, principally because it's preoccupied by personal meaning, for the individual. Often when reading contemporary philosophical texts you come across this idea of neoliberal logic (try searching google for it as a phrase)--it is, I think, 90% of the time, a nonsense idea used to obscure a bad argument, but in this case I think it applies: it's an atomised way of thinking about people and how they relate to the world. You'll note towards the end that the list of examples given of meaningful objects/activities are all entirely social in nature; except perhaps one, a career, a notion very central to our (neoliberal!) age, which hides is social nature under a cloak of economic relationships. The mention of Marx's idea of alienation is therefore funny to me: although one can understand alienation as the ennui of rote labour, you should remember that the idea is rooted too in commodity fetishism. The mistaking of relationships between people as the relationships between commodities. Each of his examples are, in strange way, social "commodities": abstract objects that an individual "has", and whose use-value is defined from its abilities to grant "meaning" to her, and can be "exchanged" between other individuals so that you might benefit from a fulfilling father-son relationship, or between the collaboration between famous artists, or the networking with workers from a prestigious company.

I say: it is the very relationships between people that are the generators of meaning, and (stands up on soapbox, music swells) that all meaning is rooted in social relationships between people, and that for anything to meaning anything whatsoever is necessarily proof of a relationship between you and some other person who may even be hidden from you. Reading an ancient text is a relationship that stretches back before you were even born: it's not an object that exists as a person does but is as real as a mathematical entity, and its understanding as a thing that can be conceived of in it's own right is the only way to build a worthwhile theory of meaning that is not just a handwavey precursor to information theory and problems of interpretation. Meaning is a relationship between people.

For a better treatment on nihilism--which better reckons on the effect science has on philosophy, or more to say the direction philosophy must take in order to be relevant after the ruin science has made of it--I recommend the work of Ray Brassier, altho it is.. very technical. There's a good interview with him here http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896 and in particular the following quote still lights a fire in my timid heart:

> Like Nietzsche, I think nihilism is a consequence of the ‘will to truth’. But unlike Nietzsche, I do not think nihilism culminates in the claim that there is no truth. Nietzsche conflated truth with meaning, and concluded that since the latter is always a result of human artifice, the former is nothing but a matter of convention. However, once truth is dismissed, all that remains is the difference between empowering and disempowering fictions, where ‘life’ is the fundamental source of empowerment and the ultimate arbiter of the difference between life-enhancing and life-depreciating fictions. Since the abandonment of truth undermines the reason for relinquishing illusion, it ends up licensing the concoction of further fictional narratives, the only requirement for which is that they prove to be ‘life-enhancing’.

> I consider myself a nihilist precisely to the extent that I refuse this Nietzschean solution and continue to believe in the difference between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. In other words, I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition.