Answered by people who lived it
What is the meaning of life if we all die anyway?
This is not a modern question. Leo Tolstoy asked it in exactly these terms at fifty, with Anna Karenina behind him and every worldly success in hand — and records that it nearly drove him to suicide before it drove him to faith. His short book A Confession is the classic first-person treatment of this exact question, and it is free to read.
Tolstoy states the question — the one he says led him, at fifty, up to suicide — in the plainest terms it has ever been given:
“The question is: “What will come of what I am doing to-day and shall do to-morrow? What will come of my whole life?” … The question may be expressed still differently: “Is there in my life a meaning which would not be destroyed by my inevitable, imminent death?””
And here is where his search ended:
““Live searching after God, and then there will be no life without God.” And stronger than ever all was lighted up within me and about me, and that light no longer abandoned me. Thus I was saved from suicide.”
Darwin's colleague George Romanes, writing as an agnostic, counted the cost of the alternative with a scientist's honesty:
“With this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness … the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it.”
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T.S. Baker — testimonies in their own words, free sources linked.