What's the meaning of life?
Unresolved contradiction. One that does not work, even under the conditions of acceptable circular logic. If you need to give life meaning, then it conditionally has no meaning, no matter the claim. What we have here is an expression of an ideal. Not reality. Idealism is how logic dies in the mind.
The question is if life already has a hidden meaning we can find, or if we just invent it due to our personal needs and interests. Another question is if we can survive mentally and emotionally living a meaningless life and just vegetating.
In Vedic philosophy, samsara (birth, life, and death) exists because there is no reason for it not to exist. Nothing got in the way of it existing. Nothing put a stop to the causal chain that led to its existence. There was no plan. There was lack of a hindrance on this world strong enough to stop it. Not yet, anyway.
Are we simply not big enough, smart enough, advanced enough to come to these conclusions? Come back in 10,000,000 years and see if you still feel the same way. For all intents and purposes I agree that this is currently the best we can come up with but it is based on very immature logic speaking in evolutionary terms.
We don't have to be that smart. We know how evolution works right in the here and now. We know all the science necessary for determining how it works. And there is absolute nothing about evolution to suggest it is a guided process or anything that began with a purpose in mind.
So even if we don't have a time machine and can't identity the actual moment in which life began, we can accurately describe how life works right now. We can do this with factual evidence and experimentation.
There are no verifiable or valid theories about any "purpose" of life in existence. So until someone discovers a purpose in life beyond its mechanical functions, logically speaking, it doesn't have one other than the ones we imagine for it.
Isn't it egotistical to believe that just because we don't know something and cannot find any evidence of it that it simply does not exist? There is something very special about life and evolution, it doesn't just change for the sake of survival but always seems to evolve toward something more advanced. This is exactly how an intelligent Higher source would have done it assuming magic does not exist. Maybe.