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What is the purpose of life?

If one is a human being, the only reasonable purpose is: collective happiness.

The illusion of individual happiness

The pursuit of individual happiness eventually leads, directly or indirectly, to harming others in order to achieve one's individual goal. By symmetry, this leads to the world we know well, where everyone complains about the nuisances caused by others, generally without awareness of their own nuisances, due to the resolution of cognitive dissonance through beliefs.

The illusion of morality in the form of fixed rules

This is the path attempted by religious movements: a series of rules supposedly guiding the individual toward morality and spiritual elevation. We demonstrate on the rest of this website that a fixed set of rules is inappropriate and always misused, and that the only valid rule is: to bow to the facts. See the question 'What must one do to be a good person?'

What is collective happiness?

Collective happiness does not mean imposing one's own stereotyped vision of happiness or personal tastes onto others. Working for collective happiness means considering all others as friends in the sense of the question 'What is a good friend?'

The hermit's path

One can act with the common happiness as an objective, but one cannot force others to do the same. Thus, discouragement leads some highly respectable individuals to withdraw from the world. However, it seems to us more appropriate to return to the question 'How to succeed in life?' and to rework Epictetus and Epicurus so that the struggle for collective happiness becomes bearable.

Go deeper

Start with the question 'What is a human being?' which sets the general framework within which we operate.
See also the question 'How to succeed in life?' which provides the method to follow.
Finally, consult the question 'What is difficult to overcome in order to succeed in life?' which covers roughly the same content with a slightly different approach.