What To Do When Your Teen Asks “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?”
I’m scraping congealed tomato sauce off dinner plates into the trash can last Tuesday when my 16-year-old Javi asks it. He’s leaning against the kitchen counter, one foot propped on the lower cabinet, AP bio notebook splayed open next to his phone. He’s been quiet all evening, since he got home from visiting his friend Lila, who got released from the behavioral hospital last week. I don’t look up at first, I think he’s talking about the homework he’s stuck on. “Hmm?” I say, dropping a crumpled paper towel into the bin. “Do people really find life worth living?” he says again, flat, no inflection, like he’s asking if we have any more milk.
I almost drop the metal pasta strainer. My first instinct is the one we all get: rush to reassure, blurt of course it is, what a silly question, you have everything to live for. But I’ve been a 4th grade teacher long enough, and a mom long enough, to know that when kids ask that kind of question, they don’t want a canned answer. So I wipe my hands on my jeans, pull out the chair across from him, and sit down. “That’s such a big question,” I say. “I’m glad you asked me.”
He explains he was on Reddit earlier, reading a thread where hundreds of people commented saying they just go to work, pay bills, raise kids, and don’t actually feel happy—they just stick around because leaving would hurt their family. He says Lila told him the same thing in the hospital: she doesn’t see the point of grinding through high school, college, a job, just to get old and die. He looks at me, says “You work five days a week sometimes, you pay the mortgage, you fold my laundry, you go to bed tired every night. Is that actually worth it to you?”
I tell him the truth. I say “Some days, it doesn’t feel like it. Last month, when Grandma had her hip replacement, when Ms. Henderson quit mid-semester and I had to cover extra class days, when the car transmission died and we had to pay $3,000 to fix it, I ate cold cereal for dinner three nights in a row and I sat on this couch after you went to bed and thought, what’s the point of all this? It’s just one thing after another breaking, right?” He blinks; I don’t think he expected that answer. He always sees me get up and do the things, he didn’t know I think that too.
But that’s not all of it, I say. I tell him about the moment last week: walking out to my car after school, there’s a dandelion growing through a crack in the asphalt parking lot. A little girl I had in class two years ago saw me, ran over, grabbed my hand, and made me stop to blow the seeds with her. That was 30 seconds. I was late to a meeting, my feet hurt, I was worried about grading 28 spelling tests. But that 30 seconds? That’s the stuff that makes the bad days worth getting through. It’s not the big stuff—getting a promotion, going on a fancy vacation, you getting into your dream college. All that stuff is nice, but it doesn’t happen every day. Most days are just the small stuff. The dog curling up on your feet when you’re sad. The way your favorite song comes on the radio right when you need it. Sharing a cold soda with a friend on a hot day.
Then I lean forward a little, and ask the question that always comes first, no matter what. “Can I ask you something straight? Are you asking this because you’re feeling like life isn’t worth it for you right now? I won’t panic, I just need to know.” That’s the first thing any parent or teacher should do when this question comes up—don’t dance around it, don’t pretend asking it means the idea will stick if it wasn’t already there. It just gives them space to say yes if they need help.
He shakes his head, says no, he’s okay. He likes his art class, he likes playing video games with his friends, he just can’t stop thinking about Lila, and how no one ever talks about the boring hard parts of life being just okay sometimes.
As a teacher, I see this all the time now. Kids grow up seeing two versions of life online: either the perfect highlight reel of vacations and promotions and picture-perfect families, or the endless doomscrolling about how everything is terrible and no one is happy. They don’t get to see the middle, which is where most of us live: some days bad, some days good, most days just fine, with enough tiny good moments to keep going. A lot of adults panic when a kid asks this question, they think it automatically means the kid is suicidal, that something is broken. Sometimes it does, which is why that direct check-in matters so much. Most of the time, it’s just a kid growing up, figuring out that life isn’t the neat happy story they got told in kids’ movies, and they need someone to be honest with them instead of lying.
After we talked that night, Javi went back to his homework, I went back to the dishes. I didn’t push for a longer, deeper talk. I don’t think you have to fix the question in one sitting. The next day, I took a picture of that dandelion in the parking lot and sent it to his phone with no extra text, just the photo. He texted back a smiley face, that was it. Small, low-pressure check-ins work better than big forced speeches anyway.
Last weekend, we drove to get ice cream after Javi picked Lila up from her house to hang out. Lila was quiet in the back seat, and halfway there she said “We saw a stray cat on the walk today, it sat on our feet for like 15 minutes while we drank boba. It didn’t want anything, it just sat there.” Javi looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I nodded. No big speech, no neat resolution. Lila still goes to therapy every week, Javi still sometimes stays up too late doomscrolling and asks hard questions I don’t have answers to. We don’t have a perfect, one-size-fits-all answer to give him. But we’re not pretending the question doesn’t deserve to be asked. That’s enough, for now.
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