What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
The dishwasher was still humming, and I was wiping down the stove when Lila asked it. She was leaning against the counter, half of a mint chocolate chip bowl melting next to her elbow, scrolling TikTok with one hand. The question wasn’t yelled, wasn’t dripping with despair—just sort of tossed out, like she was asking if we still had laundry detergent. “Do people really find life worth living anyway?”
I froze, holding a wet plastic measuring cup. My first instinct was the one we’re all taught: blurt out “Of course!” follow it with a list of all the good things she has, remind her how loved she is, fix the bad feeling right now. But I’d been a high school counselor long enough to know that when questions come this casual, they’re not always cries for help—they’re just questions. So I set the measuring cup down, wiped my hand on my jeans, and sat on the floor next to our golden retriever who was chewing on an old gym sock. “What made you ask that?”
She turned the phone around to show me a thread: hundreds of comments from people in their 20s and 30s talking about how most days are just going to work, paying bills, doing chores, and repeating. No one posts the boring, draining parts, they wrote, so everyone grows up thinking life is supposed to be one big adventure, and it’s not. Lila clicked the phone off. “All the adults I know act like it’s so great, but it just looks like a lot of work. Is it just me that thinks that, or do they all know something I don’t?”
I thought about lying. I thought about giving her the neat speech about how it gets better, how she’ll find her people, her passion, all that good stuff. But instead I thought about last Tuesday, when I’d spent 47 minutes on hold with the health insurance company, messed up the copay, then pulled into the grocery store parking lot and cried for 10 minutes because I’d forgotten the milk we needed for breakfast. I’d never told Lila that. “I thought that when I was your age, too,” I said. “And I still think that some weeks. Last Tuesday I cried in a grocery store parking lot over a carton of milk. Most days have a lot of stupid, boring, hard parts that no one talks about at dinner.”
She blinked. “You never said that.”
“Most people don’t,” I said.
Before we went any further, I asked her the hard question directly, the one so many parents are scared to bring up. “Are you feeling like life isn’t worth it for you right now? Like you’re hurting that bad?” This is the first step anyone should take, I’ve learned—don’t dance around it. Asking directly doesn’t put the idea in their head, it just lets them know it’s okay to say yes if they need help. Lila shook her head. “No, I’m fine. I just… don’t get the hype.”
That’s when it clicked back into place for me, from all my years working with teens: this isn’t depression, usually. It’s just development. Teens are just learning to think abstractly, to question the stories adults feed them. For 16 years, we tell them work hard, get good grades, make friends, then you’ll be happy. They’re starting to see that the adults telling them that are often tired, stressed, and not all that happy. So they ask the question. It’s normal. It doesn’t need to be fixed, it just needs to be talked about.
What I don’t do is give her a big list of things to be grateful for. I don’t tell her she has so much going for her, that she should be happy. That just makes kids shut down, because it feels like you’re dismissing what they’re actually feeling. Instead, I told her the unglamorous truth I’ve found: most people don’t walk around feeling like life is this amazing, 10-out-of-10 worth living thing every single day. Most days are 5 out of 10. Some are 2. Once in a while you get a 9. And that adds up. For me, it adds up to worth it.
A few days later, we were driving to the mall to get her new jeans for homecoming, and she brought it up again. “So you’re saying it’s just a bunch of okay days with a few good days mixed in?” I pointed to the cup holder between us, where her iced oat milk latte was sitting, and the radio was playing that old Olivia Rodrigo song she’s obsessed with, and we’d just sung the whole chorus together off-key. “Right now, this is two minutes that’s worth it, right? Even if the next hour is you trying on 10 pairs of jeans that don’t fit and me sitting outside the changing room scrolling work emails.” She laughed and took a sip of her coffee. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
It’s been a few weeks now, and she still brings it up every couple of days. Last night we were sitting on the front porch watering my tomato plants, she was flipping through college viewbooks, and she said “I still think it’s a lot of work for not that much payoff most of the time.” I agreed. I said “Me too, most of the time.” Then our cat jumped up on her lap, and she gave him half her granola bar, and we didn’t talk for another 15 minutes.
I don’t have the perfect answer for her. I don’t think anyone does. The thing I tell other parents and teachers now when they ask what to do when their kid asks this question is simple: don’t panic. First, ask directly if they’re hurting, that’s non-negotiable. If they say no, they’re just wondering, don’t rush to dig up a perfect, happy answer. Say you’ve wondered too. Share a small, boring bad part of your own life, instead of pretending you have it all together. You don’t have to solve existential doubt in one 10-minute conversation. You just have to let them know it’s okay to ask the question. That’s enough, for now.
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