What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
It’s 10:17 pm on a Tuesday, I’m folding Lila’s soccer gear on the living room couch, the chocolate chip cookies she begged for are two minutes from done, and she looks up from her phone and says, “Mom. Do people really find life worth living?”
I almost dropped the coffee-stained hoodie she spilled my latte on after practice last month. I’ve been a high school English teacher for 12 years, I’ve had this question scrawled in the margins of personal essays, mumbled after class when no one else was around, but I never expected to hear it from my own 16-year-old, over weeknight cookies. Early in my career, a 10th grader turned in a journal entry centered on exactly this question, and I jumped straight to the script: Of course it’s worth it! You have so much going for you! What a lovely question, but the answer is yes. He never shared another personal thing with me the rest of the year. I learned then that the script doesn’t work.
The oven timer beeps right after she asks. I pull the cookies out, set them on the stovetop to cool, and say, “That’s such a big question. What made you think of it tonight?”
She turns her phone to show me a Reddit thread about adulting, full of people in their 30s saying they just work 40 hours a week to pay for a house they never get to enjoy, drive their kids to activities no one actually cares about, and the only fun they have is counting down to retirement. One commenter said he hadn’t woken up excited about a day in 12 years. Then her best friend told her last week that her mom cries in the garage every night after work, says she never wanted kids in the first place. “I just want to know if that’s the normal thing,” Lila says. “Are most of us just pretending it’s good?”
I get it. Teens are barraged with two versions of adulthood online: one is the perfectly curated Tuscany vacation, the promotion, the clean house, the happy family that posts weekend hiking photos. The other is the “we’re all just miserable and lying about it” counter-narrative that blows up on TikTok and Reddit. No one shows the messy middle: the days that are 60% fine, 20% bad, 20% quietly good, no big highs no big lows, just stuff. Most kids have never seen that version of grown-up life, so when they hit the edge of adulthood and start wondering what they’re walking toward, they ask the question.
I break off a piece of warm cookie, it oozes chocolate down my wrist, and I tell her the truth instead of the script. “Some days I don’t think it’s worth it. Last week, I had five back-to-back parent conferences after school, I forgot to buy milk for breakfast, I came home and the kitchen sink was clogged, and you texted me at 6 pm that your field trip permission slip was due that night and you’d lost it. I sat on the bathroom floor for 12 minutes after I unclogged it, and I thought, ‘This is just stupid. Why do we do all this?’”
She blinks. She’s used to me pretending I have most things together. I keep going. “But that’s not the whole of it. The whole of it is, that same week, on Wednesday, you brought me half your granola bar after practice because you knew I skipped lunch, and it was crumbly and covered in your backpack fuzz, and that made my whole day. It’s this right now: burning our tongues on warm cookies, watching these same bakers mess up the same cake for the third time. It’s when your 10-year-old brother leaves a sticky lollipop on my nightstand because he saved it for me. Those are the bits that make it worth it. It’s not the big stuff. It’s the small crumbs.”
She eats half her cookie, burns her tongue, complains about it, and says that’s way better than the answer the youth pastor gave last month when someone asked him the same thing. He said life is always a blessing if you just have enough faith. She said that felt like a lie. This doesn’t. Then she grabs her stained hoodie and goes upstairs to her room, and 20 minutes later I get a text from her (she texts me from upstairs when she doesn’t feel like yelling) that says “Thanks for not being weird about it.”
Over the years, I’ve learned what actually works when this question comes up, and it’s never the big inspirational speech. First, if your kid or student asks this, start with a question back, not an answer. Nine times out of 10, this isn’t a cry for emergency mental health support (though of course you follow up directly if they mention hurting themselves) — it’s fear and curiosity about what adulthood actually holds. They just want to put their fear out loud before you fix it. Asking “What made you think of that today?” gives them space to talk instead of shutting down.
Second, don’t lie. If you pretend every day is amazing and full of purpose, they’ll know you’re faking, and they’ll never ask again. Admit the hard days, the boring days, the days you’d rather stay in bed than deal with work and dishes and missed permission slips. It’s okay to tell them you don’t always have the answer either.
Third, point to your own small, specific good things, not generic lines like “you’ll find your passion one day.” No 16-year-old stressed about college apps and friend drama believes that anyway. They believe you when you say “I look forward to my 10-minute tea on the porch every morning, that’s what gets me through the week” or “I get a donut every Friday on the way to work, and that’s my favorite part of the whole week.”
Last Friday, a junior stayed after my class, hands stuffed in his hoodie pockets, and asked me the same question. His parents just split, his dad moved across the country, he’s working 20 hours a week at a grocery store to help his mom pay rent. I did the same thing: asked what made him think of it, told him about the bathroom floor last week, told him about my Friday donuts. He nodded, didn’t say much, and walked out.
I don’t know if that fixed anything for him, or for Lila, or for anyone. Some days I still sit on the bathroom floor and wonder the same thing. But I do know that stopping to listen, and telling the truth instead of the script, is better than anything else I’ve ever tried. We still have Tuesday cookies most weeks, and sometimes Lila brings up bits of the conversation, most of the time she doesn’t. It’s not a neat ending. It’s just the middle, messy and warm and full of crumbs. That’s enough, for now.
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