What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
I was scraping congealed spaghetti sauce off dinner plates into the trash bin when my 16-year-old Javi asked it. The radio was still playing the scratchy indie playlist he’d left on after school, and he was leaning against the fridge, one boot propped on the lower cabinet, scrolling TikTok with the sound off. “Do people really find life worth living?” he said, not looking up. I fumbled the plate, and a glob of red sauce plopped onto the thigh of my gray sweatpants. I stared at it for a second before I answered.
My first thought was to rattle off all the obvious good stuff: your upcoming soccer playoff game, our trip to the coast next month, the way our dog Mabel loses her mind when you come home. I’d been trained, as a parent and a 10th grade teacher, to jump in and fix the bad feeling, to spin the hard question into something positive. But I stopped. I remembered being 16, sitting at my own mom’s kitchen table asking almost the exact same thing after my favorite uncle died. She told me to count my blessings, and I didn’t ask her anything that hard again for 10 years.
I put the sponge down, wiped my hand on my sweatpants (right over the sauce stain, whatever) and said, “That’s such a big question. What made you think about that today?” He put his phone down then, pushed off the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen table. He’d just seen a thread of videos talking about coral bleaching outpacing all the predictions, he said. A kid he went to middle school with just dropped out because his mom lost her job and couldn’t pay his school fees. His best friend Lila had spent two hours the night before saying there was no point in applying to college because the world would be unlivable by the time she hit 40. “I like stuff,” he said. “I like playing guitar and getting tacos after practice and all that. But it feels like everyone’s just pretending, you know? Like they all got the memo that life’s great and I’m missing it.”
I leaned forward then, and asked him the first thing any parent or teacher should ask when a question like this comes up: “Are you feeling like life isn’t worth it for you right now? Do you ever have thoughts about hurting yourself? I need you to tell me the truth, no matter what.” It felt blunt, but it’s not something you can dance around. A lot of people think asking that question puts the idea in someone’s head, but it doesn’t—it just lets them know you can handle the answer. Javi shook his head immediately. “No, I’m not. I just… wonder.”
I’ve been teaching high school for 12 years, and I’ve gotten this question at least once a semester for the last five years. It used to be just the quiet, angry kids who asked. Now it’s the honor roll kids, the soccer players, the ones who post funny reels and seem to have it all together. They grow up with every terrible thing in the world delivered to their pocket 24/7, and they’ve been told their whole lives that if they work hard, they’ll be happy and successful. So when the world feels broken, and they don’t feel happy all the time, they think either everyone else is faking it, or something’s wrong with them.
I told him I get that. I told him that last month, I spent two and a half hours on hold with our health insurance arguing over a $35 copay for a flu shot, and when I finally hung up, I sat in the grocery store parking lot staring at the steering wheel and thought, Is this really it? Is all this just running around paying bills and arguing with insurance companies? He blinked, like he didn’t expect me to say that. No one ever tells kids adults have these thoughts too. We pretend we’ve got it all figured out.
We didn’t do a fancy gratitude journal exercise—that always feels cheesy. Instead, we got a scrap piece of paper and wrote down the tiny, stupid, unimportant things that make it feel worth it even on the days it doesn’t. Javi wrote: the crunch of a really good taco chip, when your favorite song comes on shuffle, when Mabel greets you like you’ve been gone for a year even if you just walked to get the mail. I wrote: getting into cold clean sheets on a hot night, when the coffee at home is exactly the right strength, finding a forgotten mint in the bottom of my winter coat. He folded the list up and stuck it in the case of his acoustic guitar, where it still is.
The thing I tell other parents when they ask me about this is, first, check for safety—that’s non-negotiable. If your kid says they’re hurting, or they’ve felt this way most days for more than two weeks, call a counselor, don’t wait for it to get better on its own. But if it’s just the question—just that quiet wondering that a lot of teens get right now—you don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to give them a big speech about how wonderful life is. Just tell the truth. Most of us don’t find life worth living every single day. Some days we just get through, and that’s okay. The good stuff isn’t always the big stuff. It’s the taco chips and the mints and the dog greeting you at the door.
Last week, I was walking past the porch and heard Javi talking to Lila on the swing. He was telling her about that night, about the list we made. “My mom said no one feels like it’s worth it every single day,” he said. “That’s actually kinda helpful, when you think about it.” He still stays up too late doomscrolling. He still complains that school is pointless and the world is messed up. We haven’t had some big moment where everything clicks and he’s suddenly optimistic all the time. I don’t expect we will. Some questions don’t get neat answers. But he’s asking, and he’s talking, and that’s enough for right now. That’s enough for me.
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