Reddit reviews Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (The University Center for Human Values Series (35))

> I mean I've been an atheist for a long time but it didn't occur to me until recently what the absence of a higher power entail. ... Everything we hold dear only has any meaning because we tell ourselves it has.

I don't see how having "a higher power" would solve this. Suppose God existed, and said that "the purpose of life is to figure out how many asteroids there are in the asteroid belt." Even if we knew this, most people would think "well that sounds like a waste of time." It's not clear how having a higher power telling you what to do would solve this. And even if God were to tell us "the meaning of life", a natural follow up question would be, "Okay. And how is that meaningful?"

You asked for some literature on the subject, so here are some things that come to mind if you're interested in reading more on it:

Thomas Nagel's The Absurd

Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

Thaddeus Metz's Meaning in Life

Additionally, Thaddeus Metz has also written the SEP article on the meaning of life, so that may be a good place to start.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

Susan Wolf's book on the meaning of life is non-technical and on the human condition. There's plenty of literature on this if you look around.

Susan Wolf has a good book called Meaning In Life and Why It Matters. Ultimately, the 'why it matters' section is making a point about the limits of moralizing, but that may actually be beneficial given your interests, anyway.

She also does have a paper on love worth mentioning titled "Loving Attention: Lessons in love from The Philadelphia Story". It's in a book about philosophy, film, and fiction titled Understanding Love. I haven't read the other papers, but I know the philosophers' work and I bet many of them are good.