Why Your Teen Might Ask ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’ And What To Do Next
I was scraping congealed spaghetti sauce off plates into the trash last Tuesday when my 16-year-old daughter Lila leaned against the kitchen counter, thumb hovering over her TikTok feed, and asked it out of the blue. “Mom, do people actually find life worth living?”
The local pop radio was playing a song she’d obsessed over two summers ago, our golden retriever Max was pressing his cold nose into my ankle begging for scraps, and I almost dropped the ceramic plate I was holding. My first instinct, the one I’d had for years when kids asked hard questions, was to rush in and fix it: Of course it is! Look at your art, your friends, the trips we take, Max! But I’ve been a high school counselor for 12 years, and I’ve learned that instinct is almost always wrong.
I wiped my wet hands on my faded jeans, pushed the trash can closed with my foot, and pulled out the wooden chair next to the counter for her. “That’s such a big question,” I said. “What made you ask it today?”
She sat down, locked her phone, and told me about her best friend Mia, who’d failed her driver’s test for the second time that week, just found out her grandma’s lung cancer is back, and is now eating most dinners alone because her dad picked up a second night shift to pay medical bills. Mia had said over lunch that everyone’s just pretending life is good. People post their vacation photos and A’s on their math tests, but really most people are just one bad day from breaking, and no one talks about it. Lila couldn’t argue with her. She said she’d felt it too: going to class, doing homework, going to soccer practice, checking all the boxes, and sometimes wondering what it’s all for, if anyone actually enjoys any of it.
This isn’t a question I only hear from teens going through big trauma, or teens with diagnosed depression, though it does come up there too. Over the past three years, I’ve heard some version of this question at least once a week from kids who check all the “good kid” boxes: they get good grades, they have close friends, they have two parents at home, they go on family vacations. They grow up scrolling past endless highlight reels on social media, listening to adults argue about climate change and political collapse, and they get tired of being told to “just be grateful” or “work hard and it’ll get better.” When they ask this question, they’re not being dramatic. They’re asking for honesty.
The first concrete thing I tell parents and teachers to do when this question comes up is don’t rush to answer it. Most of us panic when we hear it, because we think if we don’t have a good answer, something bad will happen. But 9 times out of 10, the kid isn’t asking for an answer. They’re asking for permission to say out loud that life feels really hard right now. Instead of jumping into a list of all the good things in their life, just ask them to say more. I use the same line every time: “What has felt heavy about this lately?” That’s it. It gives them space to keep talking, instead of shutting them down by telling them their feelings are wrong.
The second thing I always do is ask directly: “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” A lot of adults are scared to ask this, like saying it out loud will put the idea in their head. That’s a myth. If your kid is in crisis, asking gives them permission to tell you, so you can get them help. If they’re not, like Lila wasn’t, it just clears the air. Lila laughed when I asked her that night, said she wasn’t suicidal, she just wanted to know if I’d ever felt the same way.
That’s the third thing: don’t lie. You don’t have to pretend every day is amazing and life is always 100% worth living. That’s not true for any of us. I told Lila that some days I leave work after talking to three different kids who’re sleeping on their friend’s couch because their parents kicked them out, then I come home to a leaky faucet and a credit card bill that’s twice what I expected, and I think “What’s the point of all this running around?” That’s normal. It doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you’re human.
Then I told her what I tell all the kids I work with: life doesn’t have to be worth living every single minute. It just needs a few small things that are worth sticking around for, right now. You don’t need a big grand purpose, or a perfect life. I keep a note in my counseling office of tiny things kids have named over the years: the way my dog curls up on my feet when I’m sad, the way gas station slushies taste on a hot day, the way my best friend sends me stupid cat memes when I’m at my worst. That’s enough. After we talked, we got the mint chocolate chip out of the freezer, sat on the back step, and watched fireflies blink over the backyard. Lila said her tiny thing is when we bake chocolate chip cookies and eat half the dough raw before we put the tray in the oven. I said that’s one of the best answers I’ve ever heard.
We don’t have this all figured out. Last week, Lila texted me from school saying Mia was having a bad day, and they skipped study hall to sit in the parking lot and eat Sour Patch Kids. Lila still asks hard questions, and I still don’t have a neat, perfect answer for her. Some days, I still wonder myself. But these days, that feels okay. We don’t need to fix the question to be with it. We just need to show up, be honest, and share the small good bits we’ve found so far.
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