The problem is assumption

I'm in the midst of an existential crisis. I have been for years, and I keep distracting myself away from it, but it keeps returning, and it keeps getting stronger each time. This time I've decided to face it and actually do the heavy lifting in hopes that I can find some basis for my life.

The Polish psychologist Dąbrowski came up with a theory to help explain the stages and outcomes of such dilemmas. Like myself, he felt that existential crisis could be a constructed as a positive thing: as a way of personal development. He calls this "Positive Disintegration." I sure hope that his theory is right, or else I'm on my way to the madhouse >.> I've been getting distracted these past few years, and collapsing back to Dąbrowski's "Level 1", but I keep popping back up to "Level 2" as if by some internal need.

The core of my dilemma is that I cannot find any basis for meaning in my life that is sufficiently solid. I'll start with the fact that I'm a staunch atheist, so a nonexistent god can't give me meaning. Most people build their meaning on a foundation that really is just a pile of assumptions hanging midair with no ground, and most people absolutely refuse to question it. I can understand why. Life is comfortable for them. They typically have no motivation to look further.

Let's take an example: "it's better to be happy than unhappy." This reduces down to the pleasure principle, and that in pure form leads to hedonism, which most people would disagree with being ideal. Furthermore, the pleasure principle is nothing but happy chemicals running through your brain. Why not take ecstasy all day? Most people would argue that this is because it's not "real" happiness, by which they mean it wasn't earned. But there are plenty of situations of people enjoying things that they haven't earned, and it also looks at happiness as a form of fixed commodity, which it clearly is not because you can often become happier by changing your perspective on something. Plus, what about a sociopath that finds joy in causing suffering in others?

Ethics in themselves make sense to me: they are what produces a functioning society. But why do we want a functioning society? To improve the quality of life? Why is that better? Is life somehow innately better than non-living things?

Meaning reduces down to value, which is by its nature hierarchal. So what do we value? And further, why do we value the things that we value? Why do we value life over death? The problem in this analysis is that you cannot place value before itself. You are applying the function "value hierarchy" to itself, and thus altering the function that is acting on itself in an infinite loop. The school of analytic philosophy puts it another way: you cannot ask "what is the meaning of existence" because that places put meaning before existence, but meaning has to exists too, so existence is actually prior to meaning!