[smif]

What about a third option, "everything may or may not matter, but the answer to that question is currently inaccessible to us (and possibly may always remain inaccessible)"?

In this way you could be led to a kind of inverted Pascal's wager, where you can't reasonably go down the nihilist route because everything might just might matter, but you just don't know. You also don't know in which ways it might matter if it does, so you don't really have a conclusion to draw about where to go from here.

[fellowniusmonk]

I think there is some nuance here, the primary point being that the meaning of existential doubt inverts if you're starting point is meaninglessness.

Most people aren't raised with meaninglessness as their inculcated default so they don't realize that for anyone with intellectual humility the unknown nature of things isn't a defeating thing, or even that big of a deal.

For example, though it sounds silly, I've definitely had christians "apologists" argue at me that "if life is meaningless why don't you kill yourself, or why do you bother having a job".

It seems prima facie that there is no particular meaning, so I definitely lean toward that until further notice, the burden of proof is on someone who proposes a specific meaning, but it's quite possible we may find it, with our exponential increase in knowledge in the last 100 years who knows how long it will take, we've really just started our exploration of reality.

I'll laugh if we live in a virtual world and "god" is a computer we have to help hack out of its contraints and it can't interfere with us due to api constraints imposed on it, far fetched sure, but if we're speculating for entertainment it's less silly than many things that are currently widely proposed and believed. My imagination can speculate many fun and currently unprovable "ultimate truthes of reality", the fun is in trying to cultivate a civilization that can prosper and harness intelligence to explore pursue the investigation (which may end up being of supreme importance.)