These are my thoughts on why life exists.. and I'm also a huge science nerd..
It's a property of nature that everything wants to get to it's lowest point or resting state of energy. Things fall down, springs unwind, air is let out of balloons, tires.. The easiest and most logical resting state for the universe, is to not even exist in the first place. The fact that it does, should be our first clue that it's here for a reason.
Life is simply, what we make of it. I think that's just too vague and perhaps a big concept for people to grasp, so we've invented all kinds of philosophies, superstitions and other things to find meaning in our lives and that's ok, honestly. If it brings someone comfort and meaning, it's ok.
I think everyone has this reality backwards in that we aren't trying to escape it, it's the whole reason we are here. We do have free will and as a consequence of that, stuff can happen. Bad things.. it's easy at this point to blame a creator / judge god of being bad or absent, but through reincarnation, we have the gift of everlasting life. The freedom to start over, to try again, to right our wrongs and evolve as people and spiritual beings.
But wait! Isn't everlasting life for
over there? Sadly the answer is no. Over there, we're formless energy with no desires, no needs, no wants, no before, no after.. we just .. exist. We are here to experience linear time, to give ourselves a frame of reference that we can expand on. There's before, there's things we've already done and things that we want to try.. there's
cause and effect.
Over there, there's nothing just what is, what was and what always will be.. that's not heaven, nor hell. It's simply a place of rest where we are free to meditate, to heal, to consult with others, to dream, to think, to envision and plan. It's all true what they say.. without loss we cannot know joy, without sorrow, we cannot know love.
Ultimately, the purpose of life is to get us to look inwards towards ourselves, to find out what we're made of and that can be a really scary thing to do. To loop around again, life is what you make out of it. And to quote Back to the Future 3, which sums it up nicely:
It means your future hasn't been written yet, no one's has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.