Fundamentally, the only reason why any of us have any intuition about life having value or meaning is because sometimes we feel happy, and sometimes we feel bad, and other times we feel scared or excited about how we might feel in the future.

That's it. Everything comes down to wanting to feel good, and avoid feeling bad.

A lot of our old values didn't really capture this. For example, the laws of the Old Testament are all about "obeying God", regardless of how that might affect people's happiness.

We're starting to migrate away from old beliefs like that, but we have yet to really lean into the understanding that human happiness - and the happiness of sentient beings in general - is truly the only source of meaning or value in the universe.