To be honest, in a way, even fighting cancer can seem meaningless. Of course, on a small scale, it is meaningful because it helps people. But on a larger scale,

To be honest, in a way, even fighting cancer can seem meaningless. Of course, on a small scale, it is meaningful because it helps people. But on a larger scale, one could argue that we have traded a fulfilling life where we have purpose for a technologically-enslaved one. And in this enslaved one, we are locked in cages and eating/breathing so much artificial chemicals that have actually increased the cancer rate for some kinds of cancers [1]. Thus, fighting cancer is really just making a small correction to a fundamentally unsustainable system to allow the unsustainable system to appear less harmful, but in reality it becomes just less harmful per unit time so that the harm accumulates in later generations. (Lower risk of cancer means lower perceived risk of polluting and hence less backlash against polluting that eventually accumulates so high that the risk becomes even greater than before the medical amelioration of cancer rates.) Thus, I think one must go beyond mere cut-and-dried solutions to find meaning in life. One must figure out what is right and go towards that as best as you can, even if in reality one may never reach that point. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-020-00670-2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-020-00670-2