[fapjacks]

Hello, I've stumbled across your comment and happy to see that enough time has passed that my reply is unlikely to be read by anyone but you. I am a very similar position as you, being a self-taught programmer, living a very "contained" lifestyle despite my past professional successes, and also in our calculus of what is meaningful and valuable. I completely agree with your sentiment about these things we see on Instagram conveying no inherent meaning, but I would like to suggest and warn you against the trap of thinking that we can possibly know what is "meaningful" to another human being, even a member of our immediate family or one of our children.

We are human, yes, and there will be inevitable similarities in the things in life from which we derive joy and sadness and meaning and love and hate, etc. But it is after all a subjective thing in the utmost, and trying to persuade or coerce our own subjective meaning and value judgments onto others will only ever result in conflict. That's not to say we shouldn't have our values challenged, as that is the only way we can grow as people. But your kid -- indeed, every human being that ever existed -- has to make this trek themselves. Nobody can do the hard work of finding meaning and purpose for us, and the older I get, the more I can see how damaging it is when we try to do this hard work for someone we care about. It's impossible to convey tacit knowledge, and it's from tacit knowledge that we derive meaning and construct our system of values. The world's languages are littered with empty platitudes as a result of this struggle. That's why the best answer is also the most challenging: Set a good example and be there to help those you care about to process their experiences (good and bad) intellectually so that they might gain that tacit knowledge. If you're still reading this, I'd like to suggest taking a look at the ancient Stoic philosophers (Epictetus, Seneca, etc), as the things they wrote thousands of years ago have been extremely helpful in my own journey.