Why Does My Kid Ask “What’s the Point?” When Life Feels Too Heavy
It was 7:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and my son Alex was sitting at the kitchen table staring at a freshwater biology packet. The pencil was untouched. I asked him if he needed help, and he didn’t snap or complain. He just said, very quietly, “Do you ever think none of this actually matters? Like, I’ll do this packet, pass a test, go to college, get a job… and for what?”
His voice wasn’t dramatic. It was flat, like he was describing the weather.
I froze. I’ve got a whole shelf of scripts ready for tantrums about video games or fights about bedtime, but I wasn’t ready for an existential audit from my fifteen-year-old while dinner burned in the oven. I trotted out the usual stuff—about opportunities, about a future he couldn’t see yet, about working hard so he had options. He nodded along, but his eyes drifted past me to the window where the dog was snoring. I could tell my words weren’t landing. They were just noise.
So I burned the pizza.
As I scraped the blackened bits off the pan, I had to ask myself the same question. Did I, a full-grown adult with a job and a mortgage and a retirement plan, actually think life was worth living? Honestly, my week wasn’t a bucket-list highlight reel. It was work deadlines, a weird noise in the car, and deciding whether to spend Saturday at the DMV. I knew it was worth it, but only because I’d lived through enough low stretches to understand they pass. Alex didn’t have that long view yet. He only saw the sheer, crushing weight of everything that comes next, and it looked exhausting to him.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to win this fight with philosophy.
I went back to the table and sat down. Instead of fighting the idea, I met it sideways. I said, “Yeah, sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. That’s really heavy.” He blinked, surprised I hadn’t argued with him. Then I said, “I burned the pizza. We have about twelve minutes left before the takeout place closes. Want to slide out of this for ten minutes and go get a sub?”
He shrugged, but he stood up. We got in the car, got the sub, and drove back in silence. I didn’t solve his crisis. But I had given him a defined, tiny break from the existential grind.
A teacher friend of mine calls this the “provisional plan.” When the future looks like a black hole, you shrink the horizon to thirty minutes. You don’t try to convince a kid that high school will be worth it. You don’t promise that college is magical. You just ask, “What’s the smallest, easiest, most bearable thing we can do right now?” Sometimes it’s getting a sandwich. Sometimes it’s cleaning one spoon. Sometimes it’s drawing a stick figure in a notebook because the homework is too overwhelming to start. The point isn’t the task itself. The point is the storm cloud briefly parting so they can take a breath.
A few days after the pizza incident, I picked Alex up from school. I didn’t ask how his day was because I know that question leads to a wall of silence. Instead, I said, “I’m going to leave a granola bar in the cupholder because I’m starving. Roll the window down if you want, or don’t. I don’t really care. Let’s just drive.” He rolled the window down.
We didn’t talk. I drove to the park where there’s a pond with entirely too many geese. We sat on a bench and watched them fight over bread crumbs for five whole minutes. It was dumb. It wasn’t deep. But it was a shared, physical thing that didn’t require planning or performance. When we got home, he picked up his backpack without being told. I think the silence actually helped more than any words would have.
I’ve been learning that when kids ask if life is worth living, they aren’t usually looking for a philosophical debate. They are trapped in a specific, overwhelming present moment. Alex’s brain was trying to compute the entire span of his existence at once, and it stalled. What he needed wasn’t a bigger picture—he needed a smaller one. He needed to touch something ordinary.
So we’ve started using tiny scripts when the dread creeps in. If one of us says something like “This is pointless,” the other is allowed to say, “That sounds heavy. Let’s just make it through the next hour. Do you want tea or a snack?” It sounds absurd, I know. But the key is to move the body before trying to move the mind. When I notice him spiraling, I say, “I need to take a walk anyway. You don’t have to talk to me. Just put your shoes on.”
I also ask for help with zero-stakes decisions. “Help me pick the worst song on this album” or “Which of these two shirts is less obnoxious?” Giving a kid agency over something small, where there is truly no right answer, builds up a tiny muscle of competence. It’s a low-friction win. When their internal world feels terrible, being able to confidently declare that the blue shirt is better than the gray one is a surprisingly solid anchor.
There’s another part of this I’ve had to confront as a parent. We adults like to act like we have the answer key. We don’t. The more I tried to hide my own bad weeks from Alex, the more isolating it felt for him. He thought adults just “got over” existential dread somewhere around age thirty. Showing him that I also occasionally find Tuesdays hopeless, and that I cope by folding the laundry or calling my sister to complain, teaches him more about resilience than any Pinterest quote ever could. It doesn’t mean unloading my own trauma on him. It means saying, “Yeah, I get overwhelmed too. I’m just weirdly good at keeping my hands busy while it blows over.”
Alex never finished the freshwater packet. He turned it in late and got a C. I felt a pang of disappointment, but then I thought about what that C represented. It represented a kid who hit a wall, got a sub, watched a goose fight, and then decided the assignment wasn’t the enemy worth fighting that night.
Last weekend, out of nowhere, he said he liked the smell of rain on the asphalt. It was a tiny observation, but for him, it was noticing something about the world that wasn’t depressing. That noticing felt like a bigger win than any A.
We’re not out of the woods. There will be more slumps and more flat, quiet Sundays. But I think we’ve built a new map for those days. It’s not a clear path to meaning, and honestly, I don’t think it needs to be. It’s just a way to walk together through the fog, without rushing him to be “fixed.” Right now, we’re taking it one sandwich, one walk, one completely unnecessary goose at a time. And for now, that’s enough.
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