> Life has no 'given' meaning

Careful [0].

The conclusion that life is meaningless as such is what follows from materialism by necessity. What is often unappreciated is that bad metaphysics leads to bad ideas, in this case that life is meaningless. And why is materialism at fault? Because it denies telos. Without telos, life is, indeed and quite literally, meaningless. But why should that trouble us if we, the world, all of it, were as the materialists say it is? Needs don't exist in a materialist universe because need implies telos (a need is always for the sake of something), and we suffer when needs aren't met, so where is this suffering about there not being any meaning in the first place coming from? So clearly, telos is real and materialism is, for this and other reasons, wrong. Otherwise, it makes no difference how you live, or even whether you live or die. Why should it bother you? It's all meaningless!

Another source of "meaninglessness" is moral in nature, specifically, that somewhere in our lives we pridefully rejected meaning because it opposed something illicit we wanted to do. Telos is the basis of morality, after all. This is something Aldous Huxley has written about. To quote him[1]:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”

Now, this sort of stuff about "consciousness" is like an existentialist opiate that temporarily soothes the pain of half-baked nihilism, but it is fragile b/c it is incoherent. Everything is meaningless, but I can invent meaning ex nihilo b/c "consciousness"? It sounds like we've quietly retreated from materialism into some kind of strange dualism where everything is meaningless but somehow "consciousness" is now pregnant with meaning. This may be the cunning of reason, leading us back slowly to the telos of human nature through a series of metaphysical halfway houses.

That's the theory. Practically speaking, people say one thing, but implicitly mean something else (materialists don't believe materialism with any real integrity because it is impossible). So when you say that "consciousness" gives meaning, you may in practice simply mean "This is the meaning I perceive" which may very well be the objective meaning. Or, it could be a way of maintaining one's refusal to conform to objective meaning and therefore objective moral duties by retreating into the virtual reality of subjectivism (this never ends well).

> happiness is one of the things that gives meaning to human life.

This is exactly backwards. Happiness is the result of satisfying the end(s) of human nature. Happiness is teleological and therefore presupposes meaning, not the other way around.

Of course, we are not guaranteed complete happiness in this life, but Kant, in a stoically severe bit of insight, said we nonetheless ought to strive to be deserving of happiness. This is the life of virtue.

[0] https://thomism.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/meaning-simpliciter...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/465563-i-had-motives-for-no...