I've thought about these things now and again myself. I don't have a clear solution or plan of action for you (unsurprisingly philosophers do not have a consensus plan for generating a meaningful life but I do have some comments you may find helpful.
So, the rationalist solution, givewell.org - against malaria. The hard thing about giving here is that it feels so inconsequential. My $5,000 could deliver ~1000 new mosquito nets, but others are already donating hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sometimes I wonder whether it's really about feeling inconsequential or if this is just the language we use to talk about meaning more generally. Thomas Nagel makes an argument like that and I find it very convincing.
For example, people often say life feels meaningless because we're so small and powerless. But becoming big and powerful doesn't seem to actually solve that problem. Causing huge changes in the world solves meaninglessness the way travel solves depression. That is, now you just have depression next to the Pyramid at Giza the same way you now just have ennui as Alexander the Great.
Similarly, I think Effective Altruism makes a very strong case for givewell.org. Mosquito netting in the right place at the right time is one of the most cost effective ways to preserve human life and reduce the suffering inflicted by disease. And givewell is one of the most cost effective ways to do that. And they still need more money to do it because there's not universal coverage yet. And because it's so cheap you can feel assured that even a small donation leads directly to improving somebody's life or even saving it. Writing a check to givewell.org is obviously a good thing.
But for some reason it just doesn't shake out properly. Something about writing a check just doesn't cash out as feeling meaningful.
I've noticed the same issue crop up in the DIY community. Usually it's not cheaper, faster, safer, or higher quality to do things yourself. But they want to do them anyway because they find it to be meaningful. Presumably writing a check to givewell suffers from this same problem they find in writing a check to a plumber, and the actual consequences have very little to do with it.
Meanwhile, if I just kept the money for myself and invested it, I could possibly retire a few years earlier, buy a tesla, drive into the sunset, etc. I'm not crippled at all by charitable giving, keeping the money would also not make me happier.
One thing I think about sometimes is how there's a certain way of seeing the world where you abstract it into things like units of account. And that's extremely powerful. If we didn't sometimes turn observations into numbers and numbers into rules we'd have no sciences. A big part of what makes a dollar great is that it's abstract and fungible. It really makes no difference which $5 note I use to buy my ice cream. Water is great because it's basically fungible. If what I care about is quenching my thirst and surviving another day then whether I drink Dasani brand water or Evian brand water makes no difference.
Friends are not abstractly fungible. If you tell your friend Felicity that what's great about her is she's easily replaced by your friend Bob that's actually kind of fucked up.
A danger in thinking in terms like "charitable giving" or "donation" or "loans without expected repayment" is this frames your actions in that abstract style. You're not doing some particular good in a way that only you could do it, you're providing a fungible resource.
I've seen this idea repeated in a lot of places like Fromm's having mode, Buber's I-it relationship, or McGilchrist's left hemispheric thinking. The theme they all share is that it's easy to try to think, for lack of a better term, like an economist about things like meaning or happiness in life. But the inevitable result is you become increasingly frustrated as the indicator number goes up while the thing it indicates refuses to budge.
This focus on the product by abstracting it and treating it as fungible at the expense of the process and its unique character circles back to what I said previously. Obviously it's important to focus on how much good you're doing. But large donations get your name on a building, not a fulfilling life. We consider Shelley's Ozymandias an ironic and tragic figure for his conflating consequences with meaning. And we remember Michelangelo for making David but not the Operai for commissioning it.
Anyway, if I had a piece of advice for meaning in life and happiness it'd be this. Don't do stuff that people generally agree is evil; have a place in the world where you feel needed; try to excel at something, especially if it supports that purpose; and have at least a handful of real, positive social relationships.
It's not much, but it's what I've got. Hopefully you found at least some of that relevant.)
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