The question 'what is the meaning of life?' looks like a factual inquiry on par with 'what is the capital of France?', but its grammatical form disguises that it may not be a well-formed question at all. Treating it as a straightforward request for information is a category mistake that generates pseudo-problems.
Asking for the 'meaning' of life conflates meaning-as-signification (what something denotes, as words have meaning) with meaning-as-point (what something is for, its aim or purpose). Much confusion dissolves once one notices that life might have a point without 'meaning' anything in the semantic sense, and that these are distinct questions.
On the modern view, meaning is not an objective feature embedded in life waiting to be discovered but something human beings construct through their choices and projects. This shifts the inquiry from detecting a pre-existing fact to the activity of conferring significance, though it risks making meaning seem arbitrary or merely willed.
Happiness and meaningfulness can come apart: a life devoted to a demanding, even painful cause may be meaningful without being pleasant, and a contented life may lack significance. Eudaimonia in the classical sense is closer to flourishing or well-being than to subjective feeling, so meaning tracks the quality of a well-lived life rather than its emotional comfort.
A good life can be modelled on a jazz ensemble in which each player realises their own freedom precisely through responsiveness to the others, producing collective harmony without a conductor or score. Meaning on this account emerges from mutual flourishing where self-realisation and the realisation of others are not in competition but reinforce each other.
If life has a point, the best candidate is love understood as the practice in which individuals flourish through enabling the flourishing of others, uniting the ethical and the fulfilling. This answer locates meaning not in some cosmic fact beyond life but in a particular mode of living that human beings can actually enact together.