Meaning is what you feel when you act and others benefit, regardless of the effect that action has on you. Happiness is when you benefit, regardless of who acted or why.
In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated.
Lots of smart people find survival in the selfish sense very trivially easy. If you do not seek out opportunities to contribute, you will lack meaning in your life. And if those opportunities do not challenge you, you will lack meaning in your life.
We are an interdependent species. Not great white sharks (independent) and not ants (dependent).
You have no logical grounds for your first sentence. As a result everything else collapses. Meaning is whatever a person defines to have value to them in a material world. They enjoy rape, the it provides meaning. You can't tell them they're wrong because it hurts others abstractly, and can't concretely if that's part of what makes it so meaningful to them.
There is nothing stopping someone from being a great white shark aside from the threat of violence from the group. If someone can figure out how get around that, like with home made genetic manipulation for viruses, well, they get to have their own meaning spread across the world.
But you're presuming that mostly suicidal is an nonfunctional mode. If a person has been depressed for 15 years, held loaded weapons to their head while they cried, and have a good way to kill themselves, it's good to be good doesn't matter. If that person doesn't care about longevity, but hopes for a fast death soon, meh. There is no meaning. Especially when you have only one drive, a fast death.
> "In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated."
I'd say finding meaning is broader than that. "Life is what you make it" rings true for me. It's possible to live a fulfilling life as a hermit if that's what you prefer, it's not always about finding meaning through relationships with other humans.
Unless you are projecting your own subjective mental map onto others which is what parent did with his proclamations.
His definition of meaning is a popular one that stems mostly from "consensus reality" but it, as you and virmundi point out, is far from objective. In fact, the work of John C. Lilly [among others] teaches us that there is no objective reality of any sort and that the human mental map is programmable.
We can learn to shift and radically alter the way we view the world and therefore the reality we experience, and thus create and project our own meaning, which is no longer immutable but ever-shifting.
In philosophical terms, this is very similar to Nietzche's concept of the Übermensch. Alas, I feel that collectively, we have a long way to go until "consensus" catches up.
In order to have a happy, meaningful life, you have to contribute to people who accept you and have those efforts reciprocated.
Lots of smart people find survival in the selfish sense very trivially easy. If you do not seek out opportunities to contribute, you will lack meaning in your life. And if those opportunities do not challenge you, you will lack meaning in your life.
We are an interdependent species. Not great white sharks (independent) and not ants (dependent).