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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 inevitably, whether directly or indirectly, leads to harming others in order to achieve one's individual goal. By symmetry, this leads to the world we know all too well, where everyone complains about the nuisances caused by others, typically without any awareness of their own nuisances, due to resolving 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 show in the rest of this site that a set of fixed rules is inappropriate, always misused, and that the only rule that holds is: submit 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 on others one's own stereotypical vision of happiness, one's own tastes. Working for collective happiness means considering all others as friends in the sense of the question 'What is a good friend?'.

The path of the hermit

One can act with the goal of common happiness, but one cannot force others to do the same. Thus, discouragement leads some highly respectable individuals to withdraw from the world. However, it seems 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.

Deepen

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