Personally, I've never been sure what people think they are saying when they talk about the "meaning of life". I can see at least two ways of interpreting the idea of meaning in life, which I call "self" meaning and "nonself" meaning.
To understand "self" meaning, first think of things, including beliefs, habits, goals and anything else that you're genuinely glad to have in your life, (or which you really want to have in your life), and ask if this thing is so important to you that not having it would (or does) make you feel that your life is significantly less worth living. If the thing is so important that it's lack would/does make your life less worth living, write it down. When you've written down all such things, congratulations, you have a list of all the things that give your life "meaning" in the sense of having value to you. Now, imagine everyone else has gone to the trouble of writing up their own lists of things that do or would make their own lives worth living. Because people vary widely, the contents of such lists will also vary widely, with some people's lists being very, very different from others. Thus, this sense of "meaning" allows us to imagine a universe in which there is an enormous variety of lifestyles, everyone lives differently in their own preferred way, everyone's life has meaning, and everyone is happy.
To understand "nonself" meaning, imagine that someone else writes down a list of things that they think give life "meaning", and tells you to ignore your list and instead follow their list, perhaps because they think some invisible magic thingy wants to use you to do these things. Because some advocates of this kind of "meaning" do not scruple to coerce people into following whatever list they happen to favor, we can imagine a universe in which there is a very small set of approved lifestyles, everyone lives the way they're told to live, everyone's life has "meaning", everyone says they're happy, but virtually nobody is actually happy.
The point here is that we can construe the terms "meaning" and "purpose" in two distinctly different ways. First, we could say that the purpose of your life is to do and have the things that most deeply matter to you, which are the things that give your life meaning, whatever those things turn out to be. Alternatively, we could see the "meaning" of an individual person's life as expressed in fulfilling some purpose chosen for them by some other person without any regard for what might work for that particular individual. Thus, on the first view "meaning" and "purpose" are things people discover within themselves, while on the second view, "meaning" and "purpose" are things imposed on people by some outside force, irrespective of their actual needs and desires.
(No spoilers, but what I'm calling "self" meaning might be related to existentialism, and what I'm calling "nonself" meaning might be related to its opposite, something called "essentialism".)
To get started on this issue, think about the following questions:
Fundamentally, does the question "what is the meaning of life" make any sense? If it doesn't, why doesn't it? If it does, what kind of sense does it make?
When you've done all the thinking you can about this issue, write a paper explaining all the things you thought, and what you thought about them.
