You can live without answering this question. Most people do. You can fill a life with work, relationships, pleasure, achievement, and distraction, and never pause long enough to ask whether it adds up to anything — whether there is a point to it, something it is all for, a reason why your particular consciousness should be glad it existed rather than not.
But the question will not stay buried. It surfaces at 3am, in hospital waiting rooms, at the edge of significant loss, in moments of unexpected clarity. And when it surfaces, the answer you have managed not to articulate becomes suddenly important.
The options
There are fundamentally three types of answer to the question of purpose.
The first is subjective purpose: meaning is what you make it. You choose what matters, you define your own reason for being, and that choice is as valid as any other because there is no external standard by which purposes can be evaluated. This position has the advantage of being coherent with a purely naturalistic worldview. Its disadvantage is that it cannot sustain itself under pressure. “I chose to care about this” does not provide the motivational depth that “this matters” does. And in the face of suffering or death — when the constructed meaning threatens to collapse — the subjective account offers little.
The second is objective purpose without transcendence: purpose is grounded in something real — the flourishing of conscious beings, the development of civilisation, the continuation of the human story — but this purpose exists within the natural world, without reference to any being outside it. This is the secular humanist position, and it has genuine moral force. Its difficulty is that the purposes it identifies are all contingent: they depend on the continuation of conscious life, which the universe gives no guarantee of. On the longest time scale, the humanist’s purposes are as temporary as the existence of the sun.
The third is objective purpose grounded in something eternal: meaning comes from participation in a reality that does not expire — from a relationship with a being whose existence and goodness are not contingent on the continuation of the physical world. This is the theistic account, and in its Islamic form it is stated with unusual directness.
Purpose as recognition, not invention
If God exists and created conscious beings, then the purpose of those beings is at least partially given by their origin — not as an arbitrary imposition, but as a disclosure of what they are made for. You discover the purpose of a tool by understanding what it was designed to do. You discover the purpose of a conscious being, on this account, by understanding the mind that brought it into existence and what that mind intended.
One theistic tradition states this plainly: conscious beings exist not to achieve or accumulate, but to recognise and orient themselves toward the source of their existence. Not as a form of servility, but as the alignment of a being with its own deepest nature. Purpose, on this account, is not invented. It is discovered. You are already in a relationship with the ground of your existence — the question is whether you live in awareness of it or not.
Why this answer satisfies where others do not
Purpose grounded in a transcendent and unchanging source has a stability that secular alternatives lack. It does not depend on continued health, social success, or the continuation of civilisation. It does not expire with the individual or with the species. It is grounded in a relationship with a being whose existence is not contingent on the physical world — which is why traditions that teach it have sustained people through conditions under which purely humanistic accounts of meaning have dissolved.