What Did Stephen Hawking Think the Meaning of Life Was?

Given that Stephen Hawking did not believe in God or an afterlife, a natural question follows: where did he find meaning? His answer was neither bleak nor evasive. He located meaning not in the heavens but in understanding, in love, and in the sheer improbable fact of our own existence.

Meaning in understanding

For Hawking, the search to understand the universe was itself a source of profound purpose. He believed that what makes human beings remarkable is not our size or importance, we are, as he liked to say, a fairly ordinary species on an ordinary planet, but our extraordinary ability to comprehend the cosmos we are a tiny part of. That we can work out the laws governing black holes and the origin of time, with brains evolved on the African savannah, struck him as something close to miraculous, and worth devoting a life to.

Meaning in the time we have

Because he did not believe in a life beyond this one, Hawking placed great value on the time we actually have. Far from making life pointless, the absence of an afterlife made each moment more precious. His advice, drawn together on the page about his words on life, was to be curious, to do work that matters, to value the people you love, and to keep looking outward at the universe rather than down at your feet. Having lived for decades under a sentence he expected to be brief, he spoke about appreciating life from a position few could match.

A meaning we make

In the end, Hawking's view was that meaning is not handed down from above but made by us: through curiosity, through relationships, through contribution. It is a humanist's answer, and a hopeful one. The universe may not have been created for any purpose, but that, for Hawking, was all the more reason to find purpose in understanding it and in each other.

Closely related is his attitude to mortality itself: see what Hawking thought about death.