The sense that a life is answerable fits being given a purpose

The argument

A second argument offered for this position works from the inside of a life rather than from cosmology. People do not generally experience their existence as a brute fact to be managed. They experience it as something they are expected to do something with: there is a difference between wasting a life and spending it well, and that difference is felt as a matter of succeeding or failing rather than merely of preferring. Proponents point out how hard this is to say in the vocabulary of the other two positions. If we exist to continue a line, then a life that continues it has succeeded, and almost nobody believes that. If the question does not matter, then the distinction between a wasted life and a good one has nothing to answer to. The argument is that answerability of this kind implies that something is being asked of us. A task can be done well or badly only against a standard set by whoever set the task, whereas a process can only proceed. Since people persistently find their lives to be the first kind of thing rather than the second, holders of the view argue, the better explanation is that a life is a task given rather than a process undergone. Defenders of the position add that this account makes sense of the specific shape of the dissatisfaction people report when they say life feels meaningless. The complaint is rarely that there is too little pleasure or too few descendants. It is that nothing is being asked, that no one is waiting, that it would make no difference either way. On this reading that complaint is intelligible precisely because it is the felt absence of something the position says is really there, and which can be obscured without being abolished.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents argue that the sense of answerability is real but local. A life can be measured against standards people set for themselves, inherit from a community, or derive from what human beings generally need in order to flourish, none of which requires a task setter outside the world. They note that the felt complaint of meaninglessness tracks isolation, idleness and lack of attachment far more closely than it tracks belief about creation, and that people who hold no view at all about why anything exists report the distinction between a wasted life and a good one just as sharply.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Standards can arise from the nature of the thing being assessed rather than from an assessor, as the standards for a healthy organism do. [Rejecting P3] An account of what human beings need in order to live well can supply a demanding standard without any appeal to an intention behind existence. [Rejecting C] The explanation fits the experience no better than its rivals if those who deny a creator report the same experience with the same force, which is what the objection claims.