I beg to differ. I think you have concluded this for purposes of avoiding questions you would rather not engage.
Start with morality. Iris Murdoch once put the question (in the voice of a fictional character) as whether right or wrong really matter. (Mattering is so close to meaning that I use them interchangably. If you think I have muddled something by doing so, I will try to sort it out.) That is, is there any reason to avoid doing wrong to others besides the penalties that society affixes to such deeds?
If your answer is "No" then you are a "hard nihilist." We are all just individual animals seeking pleasure and shunning pain, and societies which punish harm to others do better than those who don't, so it makes sense to go with the flow. But don't hand out any of that "mattering" claptrap as if people are expected to go against their nature by actually believing that right and wrong matter in some timeless, objective truth.
If that's your view, we have a rather unusual discussion to get into. But more commonly, nihilists just believe that right and wrong are matters of personal judgment, and there could not possibly be any objective way to adjudicate between, e.g. the claims of the slaves and the claims of the masters, or the claims of pillaging invaders and the claims of the peasants raped and slain by them. This is compatible with a "social compact" theory of morality, in which we agree on some (ultimately arbitrary) rules in order to make things run better. I am assuming you are in that category.
So next notice that "making things run better" is a quasi-objective standard. That is, like "if you eat a lot of sugar and fatty baked goods, your chances of getting diabetes go up" it is at least potentially definable and verifiable. You might still not want to cut down on sugar, but there is an objective reference to go by: a cause-effect relationship that stands outside people's preferences or subjective reactions.
We can have lots of fun debates about which rules "make things run better," but as those sort themselves out, the standard of the Golden Rule emerges as a pretty clear guideline: things run better if people live by rules that they can agree apply to themselves if they want them to apply to others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If we then apply Rawls' "veil of ignorance," so that you have to chose whether, e.g. slavery will be allowed without knowing whether you will be slave or master in such a system, we have a philosophically sound and objective basis for deciding rules of right and wrong.
Now we turn to the matter of ruling purposes in rather than just ruling out wrong things. We have to decide whether there is any objective basis for adjudicating what is "worthwhile". That is the question about meaning. A meaningful life is one that the person can verify (and also sense intuitively) is worthwhile.
Now, since there are obviously so many different ways to do life right, one is tempted to slip back into nihilism with a declaration that the whole question is arbitrary and irredeemably subjective (soft nihilism) or even "meaningless" (as in, cannot possibly correspond to an issue that can be made intelligible - hard nihilism).
Note that if the hard nihilist is correct, then it really doesn't matter whether you live your life trying to die with the most toys, or trying to have sex with the most partners, or trying to gain psychological dominance over the most enablers. It's just a matter of (individual) preference. (Of course this makes reference to an implicit standard, like "what makes life worthwhile is whatever makes you happy." The true implication of the hard nihilist position is that it doesn't matter if you are into cutting yourself one day and sniffing glue the next day, and writing graffiti on the wall a third day. Randomly jumping around from one enthusiasm to the next might bother your shrink but it doesn't matter.)
Once again, we have a position that people tell themselves, as a matter of rhetoric, but almost nobody follows. People continue to sense that if they pursue some objectives they will feel better about themselves as persons of worth if they follow them. Soft nihilist rhetoric claims that such personal meaning is "made" or "chosen" by the individual. The implication is that it is, at least objectively speaking, arbitrary.
But once again, if you watch what people do, they behave as if they have an inner compass that tells them some ways to live are more worthwhile than others. Now obviously some of that inner compass comes from the way we were raised. If you are German (and some other ethnicities), then reversals of Carnival may be seen as a healthy and mind-clearing activity. But the key observation is that we construct rationales to explain why it might be a good idea for everybody to flirt with everyone else's partner for one day out of the year, for example. That is, we make reference to a sense of an external standard.
A nihilist considers these rationales to be fundamentally illusionary. As if we were all trying to decide what the cloud shapes really look like. But the fact that we don't live as if they are illusionary suggests that it may be the nihilist's claim which is meant to obscure truth, and it is worth asking why the nihilist is engaged in such misleading of the self.
The truth is, "Life's a bitch, then you die," doesn't make for a very satisfactory philosophy of life. And since most of us agree that some things do make life more worthwhile than others, we have an "intersubjective" process (I learned this word thanks to BookTalk from Yuval Noah Harari) of trying to discern which guidelines are helpful and which are not, to discern how to tell whether some way of living is worthwhile.
The fact is, of course, that no discernment is ever so effective that it can tell you with exactitude that you have chosen the most worthwhile, meaningful life for yourself. Most people in most times are good natured about this, laughing off the very different conclusions people reach. "Nought's as queer as folk" as the character in "Full Monty" put it, quoting some North England saying no doubt. But by the same token if you laugh off the whole question, you are likely to put yourself in the position of doubting whether you have lived in a worthwhile manner.
Christians have fairly recently begun using the term "incarnational" to talk not just about our beliefs about Jesus but also about finding harmonious standards of meaningful life that allow for the differences in people. Different people have different roles to play in the grand scheme of living meaningfully. Some are meant to walk with others as accompaniment in difficult times. Some are meant to help others with gifts from the money they have made. Some are meant to practice a musical instrument until they can make it create beauty. Some are meant to bang on about philosophical subjects on the internet. Etc, etc, etc. The idea is that we don't just "discern" meaningful living, we also make it happen, by living well within whatever pattern we are cut out for, or happen to have fallen into.
If allowing for personal differences means to you that meaning in life is "subjective," fine, but never make the mistake of thinking it is "arbitrary." At the very least, it is intersubjective in a way that takes into account individuality.
Standards of meaning are hazy and difficult to weigh against one another. I look at that as part of the fun. Like figuring out how to play chess well, only it's life that we are trying to get the hang of. But it is totally misleading to assert that we "make up" the criteria for making life meaningful, as if we could sit down and say, "yesterday I thought that helping my fellow humans makes life worthwhile, but today I think wearing a really interesting combination of pink and blue makes life worthwhile."
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