The meaning of life is balance. The goal of life is legacy.
The best form of legacy is continuation and cultivation of your bloodline. You are the product of over a thousand years of generationally sequential survival competence. For every human being alive today, millions of bloodlines were not as successful and died out. YOU are the only thing left to show from dozens of lifetimes filled with hard work, suffering, and the will to succeed. If a single link in your ancestry failed, you would not be here. In the grand scheme of things, you are on a bus filled with every ancestor that came before you, and every descendant that will come after. This lifetime is a representation of your turn at the wheel. Your actions, your choices will affect everyone on the bus with you. Carelessness or sloth on your part is disrespectful to all who have come before, and possibly fatal to all who may come after.
Barring that, the next best form of legacy is positive advancement of society. Whatever form that may take, the goal should be to leave the world a better place due to your existence. In either case, if you leave no trace of your existence, you are but a worker ant, destined to operate as a drone until your ultimately insignificant death, quickly erased from the pages of history.
The meaning of life is balance between this goal and healthy chase of personal happiness. For if you arrive only to burn out prematurely and fall to the vices of men, such as alcohol, drugs, or degeneracy, all your effort is for naught. If you are not but happy, does anything else matter in the end?
