Great topic brought up by Ed Brayton at Dispatches, who writes in part:

The entire span of a person’s existence on earth is not even a blip on the radar in the context of the physical and temporal existence of the universe. But just because our lives have no grand, universal meaning doesn’t mean they don’t have any meaning at all. You do not matter to the universe but you certainly matter to the people around you.

I’ve never been bothered by questions over the meaning of life, because it just never seriously occurred to me that life has any grand meaning, just like it never bothered me that I might not exist, or that consciousness is an illusion or the cognitive equivalent of junk DNA.

By analogy, I know music is just the physics of sound waves acting on the neurochemistry of my ears and brain. But it still sounds cool, it can still change my mood, it can still make me happy or bring a tear to my eye. My life feels important to me, and that feeling is innate. I don’t need mysticism to explain that feeling, and I certainly don’t need ridiculously implausible gods to justify it. In fact, playing one of billions of pawns in a 10,000 year-old pissing match between rival deities strikes me as about the most dismal meaning my life could possibly have.