When Your Teen Asks ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’ What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
The ceramic pasta bowl clinked as I set it in the dishwasher, steam from my leftover tea curling up to fog my glasses. Lila was slouched in the kitchen chair across the room, thumb scrolling TikTok on her phone, the volume turned so low I could only hear a murmur. Half an hour earlier we’d bickered about her curfew, so the quiet was a little tense, ordinary. Then she looked up, and asked, just casual, like she was asking if we had any more laundry detergent: “Do people really find life worth living anyway?”
The wooden spoon I was holding slipped out of my hand and clattered into the sink. I pulled my glasses off to wipe them, buying a few seconds to think. I’m both Lila’s mom and a 10th grade English teacher, so I’ve had this exact question three times in the last month, from three different kids. Two weeks before that night at home, Javi, a quiet 11th grader, stayed after class to turn in a late essay on The Great Gatsby. He lingered by my desk after everyone left, kicked a crumpled quiz into the trash, and said most of the characters thought the whole American Dream was garbage, and he kind of got it. What’s the point of all this work, he asked, if most people are just tired all the time anyway? I’d almost given the generic answer back then, but I didn’t.
That night with Lila, I turned off the dishwasher and sat down across from her instead of rushing through chores to get to my stack of grading. I said, “Some days I don’t. Some days it’s just checking things off the to-do list, and that’s all I’ve got in me.” She blinked, like she expected me to gasp and say of course it is, go call your friend and get ice cream to cheer up. “Really?” she said. “You’re always… you know, on. Planning the camping trip, grading all those papers, making my favorite cookies on Sundays.” I laughed and told her the “on” is mostly a costume I put on, same as everyone else. I told her last week I spent 45 minutes sitting on the couch after work staring at a wall because I couldn’t even summon the energy to put laundry in the dryer.
She nodded and explained she’d stumbled on a TikTok thread where hundreds of adults commented that they just go through the motions, no one actually enjoys life day to day. She didn’t know if it was true, or if everyone was just being edgy for likes.
Most of the time, when kids ask this question, we panic. We assume it’s a suicide warning, or a sign they’re severely depressed, and we jump to fix it immediately. Sometimes it is that, and if they mention hurting themselves or not wanting to be here anymore, you call your doctor or mental health provider right away—that’s non-negotiable. But most of the time, it’s not a cry for crisis intervention. It’s a kid trying to square what they see online—all the perfectly curated happy lives that feel unobtainable, all the viral rants about how everything is broken and hopeless—with the quiet tiredness they feel themselves, between AP tests and college apps and friend drama. They don’t actually need a big, perfect answer. They just need you to not lie to them.
The first thing I do now, whether it’s my kid or my student, is not jump to “of course life is wonderful!” That’s a lie, and kids can smell it from a mile away. Instead, I start with a specific question: “What made you think about this today?” That gets them talking, instead of shutting down because you just brushed their question off. I don’t suggest they go for a run or spend less time on social media, not right away. That just tells them you don’t want to talk about the hard stuff.
Then I talk about the small things, not the big, distant milestones. No 16-year-old feels motivated by “someday you’ll graduate college and get a good job and be happy” when that’s 10 years away and everything feels unstable right now. I told Lila I don’t feel like life is worth living for big things most days. I feel it for the 10 minutes after everyone goes to bed, when I sit on the back porch and eat a cheap dark chocolate bar and watch the bats catch mosquitos. I feel it when she teases me about my bad driving and I laugh so hard I snort. I feel it when a student writes a line in an essay that’s so sharp and honest I stop grading and just sit with it for a minute. Some days, that’s all there is, and that’s enough.
After Javi talked about this in my class, I didn’t give him a speech. I just remembered he mentioned he’d started baking sourdough again, like he did with his grandma when he was little. The next day when I saw him between classes, I just said, “How’s the sourdough this week?” That’s it. A month later he brought me a small loaf, still warm, a little lumpy around the edges. It was delicious.
Last Saturday, we were walking our old beagle around the block, and the cherry tree down the street was dropping blossoms all over the sidewalk. Lila stopped, kicked a pile of them into the air, and tucked a blossom behind my ear. “This is pretty good,” she said, quiet like she didn’t mean for me to hear it. I said “Yeah, it is.” We haven’t talked about that question again, not in so many words. I still have days where I drag through the to-do list and can’t name a single thing that feels worth it. I don’t have a perfect answer for any of the kids who ask. But I know that letting them ask the question without panicking, without lying, that’s more than most of us got when we were their age. That’s enough, for now.
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