Of all the knowledge we can acquire or possess, knowledge of the purpose of life reigns supreme. Why do we exist, and for what reason do we exist, and therefore, how should we conduct our lives? The extraordinary impact religions have had on mankind for thousands of years has to do with exactly the fact that they have always pretended to have the answers to these questions.
In the monotheistic religions that have evolved in the Middle East (mainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the answer is that we walk this planet to conduct lives that please God, so that after death, we will be elevated to another world, called paradise, where everything is better for those who have avoided sin on earth.
In Hinduism, the gods are less serene, and instead of being elevated to paradise, we will just be reborn on earth as a Brahman or a cow if our karma is good, and if our karma is really bad, we will come back as a worm and be trampled upon. Therefore, the purpose of life, so they teach, is to take good care of our karma and to follow the prescribed rules.
In the religions of East Asia, they tell us that the purpose of life is to attain enlightenment, which sounds like a great respect for knowledge, but on further investigation, it turns out that what they have in mind isn’t science, but rather enlightenment through meditation and total withdrawal from the world.
In modern times, ideologies have sometimes replaced religions in providing answers to the purpose question.
During the European Age of Enlightenment (no relationship to what Asians understand by the term), the idea was forwarded that a common good is worth living and dying for. This gave rise to patriotism and culminated in the racism of the Nazis, who felt that they were what Nietzsche defined as the “Übermensch”.
In Communism, “social progress” was defined as a proper, idealistic purpose for which to live.
All crap.
Neither the priests and imams, nor the Himalayan gurus or the philosophers of the Enlightenment, nor the party bosses, nor the politicians advocating democracy and freedom for everyone are the proper authorities to address with questions about the purpose of life, but biologists.
And their answers are just as easy to formulate as the answers of religions and ideologies: the purpose of our lives is to engage in activities that are associated with propagation. This is not the same as saying we live to propagate, because the purpose is in the journey, not in the destination.