What Does It Mean When a Student Says Life Isn’t Worth Living?
During third period, Marcus wrote two sentences in his journal and then spent the rest of the block drawing a cube over and over, shading the same corner until his pencil left a dark groove in the paper. The prompt was “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Most of the kids wrote about college, cars, or getting out of their parents’ house. Marcus wrote: “I don’t know if life is worth living. I’m not saying I want to die. I just don’t know why it matters.”
I let the journals sit in a pile on my desk for two hours before I read them all. When I got to his, I read it three times. Then I put it down and graded a stack of vocabulary quizzes that had no business taking as long as they did.
I didn’t react immediately, and I think that mattered.
In my first few years of teaching, a sentence like that would have sent me straight into problem-solving mode. I would have pulled the student out of class, asked if they were safe, called a counselor, and emailed the parent before the bell rang. Some of that is necessary. But some of it can actually get in the way. Because when a fourteen-year-old writes that life isn’t worth living, the first thing they need is not a rescue plan. It’s a person who doesn’t flinch.
I asked Marcus to stay after class the next day. He came over slowly, backpack half on, phone already in his hand.
“I read your journal,” I said.
He looked at the floor. “Yeah.”
“Is this about something specific?” I asked.
“No. It’s just a question.”
“Okay.” I paused. “I’m not trying to send you anywhere. But I want to hear more about it. Is it more like heavy sadness, or is it more like wondering?”
He shrugged. “I guess wondering. Like, everyone does all this stuff to get somewhere, and then what? You get old and die. Why does it matter?”
I didn’t tell him that life is a gift. I didn’t tell him it was precious, or that his future would be bright, or that there are people who love him. All of that might have been true, but it wasn’t what he needed to hear. What he needed was to be taken seriously.
So I said, “I’ve wondered that too. I still do, some days. It’s a real question.”
He looked up. “Really?”
“Really. It doesn’t make you broken. It makes you someone who’s thinking.”
We talked for maybe seven more minutes. Not about his feelings or his childhood or his relationship with his parents. We talked about whether a life has to have a purpose to be worth living. I told him I didn’t think it did. He told me he wasn’t sure that made sense. I said that was fine.
The next week, his mom emailed me. She wrote that Marcus had told her about our conversation, and that she was scared. She said, “He’s never seemed unhappy. We had a good summer. He plays soccer. What did I miss?”
That’s the hardest part for parents to understand. Sometimes there’s nothing to miss. The question “Is life worth living?” doesn’t always come from pain. It can come from development. Around age thirteen or fourteen, kids start to think abstractly in a way they couldn’t before. They start to see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is genuinely unsettling. Once you realize that people grow old, that not everyone reaches their goals, that suffering is real and sometimes random, you start asking questions you didn’t know were available to you.
That doesn’t mean every kid who asks is fine. Some are deeply depressed. Some are in danger. But not every existential question is a crisis. The danger is treating it like one, because then the child learns to keep the question to themselves.
Here’s what I’ve learned to say when a child tells you life doesn’t feel worth living, whether they’re eight or seventeen.
First, don’t say “Don’t talk like that.” That’s the fastest way to shut down the conversation. The child isn’t being dramatic. They’re trying to make sense of something. If you respond with panic, they’ll learn that this thought is too scary to share, and they’ll start carrying it alone.
Second, don’t rush to reassure them. I know it comes from love, but “But look at everything you have to live for!” often sounds like “Your feeling is wrong.” It doesn’t help them feel understood. It just tells them that you can’t handle what they’re saying.
What works better is a simple, honest question: “Tell me more about that.” Or “How long have you been thinking this way?” Or “Is it more of a sad feeling or more of a question in your head?” Those aren’t perfect phrases. They don’t fix anything. But they let the child know that you can sit with them in the uncertainty.
In the classroom, I started doing something small after Marcus’s journal. Once a month, I change the writing prompt from something future-focused to something more open. Instead of “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I’ll ask, “What is something you’ve been thinking about lately that you don’t have an answer for?” The kids who need to write something heavy will write it. The kids who want to write about a video game will do that instead. It’s not therapy. It’s just a door that doesn’t require a crisis to open.
I also stopped grading every journal entry. Some writing should be low-stakes. When kids know their thoughts are being evaluated—especially their private, uncertain thoughts—they edit themselves. The entry that says “I don’t know if life is worth living” becomes “I am learning to set goals.” That’s not honesty; that’s performance.
Now, I have to be clear. There’s a difference between Marcus’s question and a child who says they want to die or that they have a plan. That’s not a philosophical discussion. That’s an emergency. If a student says something like that, you don’t rely on your instincts or your philosophical patience. You follow the school’s safety protocol. You tell a counselor. You call the parent. You make sure the child is not left alone.
But for the student who is simply asking a big question, the most useful thing we can do is stay. Not solve. Not cheer them up. Just stay.
A few weeks later, Marcus wrote another journal entry. It said: “Maybe the point isn’t whether life is worth it. Maybe the point is you get to decide what counts as worth it.” I read it, nodded, and wrote a small note in the margin: “I think you’re onto something.” I don’t know if that note meant anything to him. He didn’t mention it. The next day, he was back to drawing cubes and asking to go to the bathroom twice a period.
That’s okay. I don’t need him to have a breakthrough. I need him to know that he can ask the question out loud and the person next to him won’t run away.
I don’t know if Marcus will feel, at thirty, that life is worth living. Some days I’m not sure how I would answer that question myself. But I know that one Tuesday afternoon, a kid wrote something scary and true in a journal, and an adult didn’t panic. That counts for something.
What it counts for is still unclear. But it counted.
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