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after experimenting for a while, I now prefer "for what purpose?" instead of "why?".

"why?" easily leads to cycles and going back down the abstraction hierarchy, where "for what purpose?" always goes up the abstraction ladder.

- why are you eating? because it's 7pm

- for what purpose are you eating? to satisfy my hunger

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That sounds weird. The starting point of a post-mortem is usually something like "Why was x down?". "For what purpose was x down?" is not the correct question there, it's not like you were purposely bringing it down for maintenance.

For what purpose only works if there is a purpose. "For what purpose are you hungry" doesn't really work.

You can probably make up reasons. "To induce me to ingest nutrients" "To provide me with energy" "To fulfill some biological imperative" is one possible route.

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