Meaning
The felt sense that one's life signifies — produced when what a person actually does lines up with what they actually value, at a difficulty they can just barely meet.
Meaning is not a mood and it is not an opinion about the universe. It is what appears when three things coincide: a person's actions, a person's Values, and work that stretches them without breaking them. Remove any one and it goes. Act against your values and no amount of success supplies it; hold beautiful values and do nothing with them and it thins; do work far beneath or far beyond your capacity and it drains away as boredom or as dread (The Zone Of Optimum Development).
That makes meaning diagnostic rather than decorative. A person who has lost it has usually not lost their beliefs; they have lost the correspondence between their days and their beliefs, and the gap is the thing to look at. This is why the ordinary instruments of the Game bear on it directly — a Quest worth the trouble, a Commitment kept, a Cell where one is known by name, an hour that belongs to what matters (The One Hour A Day Practice · A Day Well Lived). Meaning is not sought by looking for it; it is a by-product of alignment and of being genuinely needed by someone.
It is also social and it is narrated. A life signifies partly by its place in a larger story, which is why a people that has lost its story loses meaning wholesale rather than one person at a time, and why telling a true and forward-facing story is a repair and not an entertainment (Story · Your Story Woven Into Meta Story · Mythos · Forward-Looking Story). The deepest layer is the one the older traditions name: significance is not manufactured privately but received, in relation to the Source that everything else hangs from (Purpose · ØNE).
A body can therefore build for it. Opportunities for real relationship, real growth and real contribution are not perks; they are the conditions under which the people in a body remain able to find their lives worth living (Meaningful Work · Belonging).
Also called: significance · a life that signifies
Stands on: Values · Purpose · The Zone Of Optimum Development
Opens onto: Meaningful Work · Story · Mythos · Belonging · Quest · A Day Well Lived · Wellness · Mental Health · Pillar VII — Sacred Culture, Art, and Story
In play: the daily practice, and the seasonal look-back — when a Player asks whether the season they just spent was spent on what they say they care about
Sources: Meaning (root page, stub — one sentence, giving the values-alignment-and-zone definition this page opens out) · Zone Of Optimum Development (root page) · lionsberg.wiki: Meaning
Open: The root page is a single values-sheet sentence; everything beyond that definition here is synthesis from the surrounding canon and from general understanding, and it is thin. · The canon uses meaning in a second sense — the semantic content of a word or page — which is a different concept and lives with Language and Semantic Capture.