What Is Man's Purpose In Life?

This is a question that comes to us some time or the other. 

There could be very many good answers.

1. To be the best we can

2. To leave the world a better place than when we arrived

3. To quote Thirukkural (Thondrir Pugazhodu Thondruga...) - To be born to be famous (meaning to do something good that achieves fame)

4. To be a good person and do good to humanity

5. To make money (Ayn Rand way - this may be one of the toughest and nice ways)

And so on. 

Each of these options assumes we have freewill and hence that we are at liberty to do what we want,  achieve what we want.

What, now, if we don't have freewill? I have mentioned in earlier posts, quoting Daniel Kahnemann, that most (about 90%) of our decisions are intuitive and taken by the heart (called System 1 or S1) without conscious thought. Only 10% of our decisions involve conscious and logical thought (called System 2 or S2). Even when S2 is invoked, it is invoked by S1 over which we have no control. In effect we do not have freewill - this is my conclusion not Kahnemann's. You can also read the excellent article about the lack of freewill mentioned within this post: http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/11/free-will-or-paid-will.html 
and my other posts http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/freewill-contd.html and http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/define-freewil.html

In the absence of freewill what is our purpose in life? To put this in perspective,  assume we ask this question of a cat or a dog. What is the purpose of a cat in this life? Ask this question from the cat's point of view. Or ask the same question from our perspective. In either case can we list any reasons describing the purpose? 

In the absence of freewill, is the purpose different for a cat from that of man? 

Ask this question of a software program. What is its purpose? Only its creator (the author) knows the purpose. The program itself may not know what its purpose is. Maybe the same applies to man and cat.  

Only the creator knows what our purpose is. We, without freewill just like software, have no clue about our purpose. Just like software our purpose is to execute (as a software does) ourselves in the way our creator intended. Now if a software does not run as intended, do we blame the software? We might but then, we are actually blaming the creator. Same way if man or cat diverges at all from its so called purpose, it's not the man or cat at fault. 

Man, just like software in the absence of freewill,  isn't even aware of his purpose. And neither he not the software was designed to know his / its own purpose.

Additional reading:

1. http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/10/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahnemann.html
2. http://www.beinghuman.org/article/conscious-thought