The system we live in today is definitely not well designed (if it has everbeen designed at all). What the purpose of life is, is an open ended question with at least seven billion (and increasing) different possible answers, or even more, since for instance my answer would change from day to day. I am pretty sure though, that if a worldwide survey was carried out, the word "happiness" would be ranked among the most mentioned ones.
Let us analyse our system based on the next assumption:
When are we happy? What do we enjoy doing and what makes our lives worth living? Difficult questions again. However, we can try to find answers from the observation of what people around us express orally and with their body or face. Many people do not like their job. They complain about timetables, bosses, customers, colleagues, etc. It is the people who work on fields they really love or those who perform tasks whose good effects are clear every day, who like their job. Seldom have I seen a cheerful bus driver, supermarket clerk or security guard.
Free time is in the other hand useful to understand what people intrinsically like doing. We usually meet friends or other people, we like to be relaxed, we like to enjoy all kinds of arts, we like to exercise our body, we like to leave the city and go into the wild, we like to sleep as much as we need, we do not like timetables, we like to help each other and to feel valued for what we do,...
Now, our system tries to create a need for money on us (this need is totally unreal. It is perfectly possible to life with no money). It makes us believe that we need money to survive and even more, to enjoy life. This makes me laugh; we are so stupid. We come to this world and we just accept the "rules" of the established system; and I myself have sometimes laughed at people in the middle age who accepted to be the king’s "slave" for a whole life. How stupid!
In order to obtain money we need to do something that fulfills somebody else’s desires. Those desires might not agree with ours or can even be against our moral principles...nej, nej. Mistake = unhappiness. We become slaves when we sell our souls to the best bidder. This happens because we follow this equation:
This equation might be right in some cases, but it is not universal, and above all it explains an "if" condition, not an "if and only if" condition. This means that for example we will get money "if" we have a job, but we will not get money "if and only if" we have a job. The same thing applies to all the other equal symbols. There are thousands of ways to get what we want and need, as there are infinite paths to happiness or to whatever our purpose in life is. Besides, if we take another look at the equation, we see that money and job are just means, not ends. Job and money, together, could be substituted by "activities" or "actions" we need to perform in order to fulfill the goals of our life. They are means to an end.
It is pretty embarrassing to say (and at the same time it shows that we can learn from absolutely everybody) that I heard a very enlightening quote from a famous Hollywood actor. He said that "the system we live in has been created by other people who are not smarter than we/you are". I would personally modify it to "people who might have been mistaken". This means that we cannot accept what we get without having analysed it ourselves from a very simple perspective beforehand: we are animals on Earth (we share what we have with many other beings), we come here for a while, we have some needs and a purpose in life.
The system I envision provides us with what we need: food, shelter, clothes and communication to a certain extent. It does that in an automated way, although I strongly believe that many people would enjoy to grow their own vegetables, for example, even if they did not have the need to do so. The system then leaves
us plenty of time to make our life meaningful by doing what we really believe we have to do and what really satisfies us.
!It might take some time until we reach that point. A useful piece of advice for the meantime is to direct our attitude towards actions that will be for our own benefit. Our brain is incredibly powerful and if we program it so that we enjoy everything we do, we will just simply enjoy it. It’s fascinating! There is always something enjoyable in every single activity and it is just a matter of finding the right perspective for it. With this shift the "waiting time" until the envisioned system is ready will just fly.