Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the "meaning" to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I'm blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can't smell), etc.

I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.

Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of "purpose" or "reason" is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the "purpose" of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like "I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet". Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn't need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since "purpose" aka "reason for being" is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.

Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be "to be entertaining".

So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn't one.