That tension is exactly where most of modern philosophy of meaning lives. The universe being indifferent doesn't automatically empty your life of meaning—it just changes where meaning has to come from.

Roughly three positions are worth knowing:

• Nihilism: nothing is objectively meaningful, so subjective meaning is an illusion we tell ourselves.
• Existentialism:meaning isn't found, it's made. You are “condemned to be free,” as Sartre put it, and your choices constitute who you are.
• Absurdism:Camus' move—accept the mismatch between our hunger for meaning and a silent universe, and live anyway, lucidly, even joyfully.

“Decorating the void” is a great phrase. An absurdist would say: yes, and the decorating is the point.

Fair pushback—and a common one. But I'd argue Camus isn't saying “trick yourself into happiness.” He's saying something more specific: the moment Sisyphus walks back down the hill, fully aware that the rock will roll again, is the moment he becomes free. Lucidity is the whole point—not denial.

If you strip away the metaphor, the claim is roughly:

• Meaning doesn't require cosmic backing.
• Despair is a response to expecting cosmic backing and not finding it.
• Once you give up that expectation, the activity itself can carry the weight.

Whether that's “cope” depends on what you think a good philosophical answer should do. If it should deliver objective meaning from outside us, Camus fails by design. If it should help us live well without lying, he's doing real work.

That move—“X is just Y”—is what philosophers call greedy reductionism. It's often doing more rhetorical work than metaphysical work.

Consider an analogy. A symphony is “just” air pressure waves. True at one level. But you can't derive the experience of the symphony, or its musical structure, from a description of pressure waves alone. The higher-level description isn't a fiction—it's where the relevant patterns live.

Three serious takes on mind

• Physicalism:mental states are physical states, but that doesn't make them unreal—water “is” H2O and is still wet.
• Functionalism:what makes a mental state what it is, is the role it plays—not the substrate.
• Property dualism:physical and experiential properties are both real, even if they're tied together.

On any of these, “your sense of meaning is a brain state” doesn't entail “your sense of meaning is fake.” It just locates it.

Honestly, the philosophers who survive contact with real life tend to converge on a few moves. None of them are profound on their own—they get profound when you actually do them.

• Pick projects that outlast moods. Meaning tends to live in commitments, not feelings. Feelings are weather; commitments are climate.
• Narrow your circle of concern.The universe is indifferent, but your friend isn't. Most meaning is local.
• Make something.Writing, building, cooking, caretaking—activities where the world pushes back are better antidotes to nihilism than arguments are.
• Stay lucid.Don't paper over the void with a story you don't believe. Camus was right about that part.

Put differently: you don't have to solve the meaning of life to live a meaningful one. You just have to stop waiting for permission.

Anytime. For what it's worth, the fact that you're circling these questions at all is already most of the work. The unexamined life isn't the problem—the un-lived examined one is.