When Your Teen Asks “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?”: What I Learned as a High School Teacher
The October rain streaked my classroom windows so thin the football field looked like a smudge of gray. The final bell had rung 12 minutes earlier, and most of my 10th grade biology students had already bolted for buses or practice, leaving crumpled gum wrappers by the door and a half-empty bag of cheddar crackers on the front lab table. I was halfway through a stack of cell respiration quizzes, red pen hovering over a kid’s answer that claimed mitochondria make “vibe energy,” when I noticed Lila lingering by the bookshelf.
She was the quiet one, sat third row back by the wall, turned every assignment in on time, never raised her hand unless she was confused about a due date. I figured she’d forgotten her worksheet. I set my pen down and was about to point to the stack by the door when she spoke, voice flat, like she was asking if we could push the lab back a day.
“Ms. Carter? Do people really find life worth living?”
My first instinct was the one they drill into you in mandatory suicide prevention training: stay calm, ask direct questions, walk her to the counselor’s office before the end of the period. But I thought about Javi, the year before, who’d written a similar line in a weekly journal assignment: “Most days I don’t see the point of all this homework.” I’d followed the script exactly, referred him same-day, and he’d turned in one-sentence, nothing-personal responses for the rest of the semester. He never talked to me about anything that wasn’t a lab rubric again.
So I pushed my lukewarm oat milk latte an inch to the side, leaned back in my squeaky desk chair, and nodded at the empty plastic chair across from me. “That’s a way bigger question than cell respiration. You got 20 minutes before your mom picks you up?”
She nodded, shuffled over, and sat down, backpack still slung over both shoulders. She picked at a loose thread on the strap before she kept going. She wasn’t going to hurt herself, she said quickly, like she already knew what I was going to ask. She just… watched everyone around her. Her mom worked two nursing shifts and complained every night about bills and her boss. Her older brother had dropped out of state college six months earlier and spent most days on the couch playing video games, and no one in the house talked about why. All her friends spent every weekend studying for the SAT and arguing about which extracurriculars would look good on college apps, and none of them ever seemed to have any fun.
“Everyone says high school is the best years of your life,” she said, and she didn’t sound sad, just tired. “If this is the best, what’s the point of the rest? Am I just broken for not feeling… excited about any of it?”
I get that question more than you’d think, not from kids who fit the “at risk” profile people picture, but from the quiet ones, the high achievers, the kids who never get sent to the office. They don’t yell it or post it or make a scene. They ask it after class, or scribble it in the margin of a worksheet, or mumble it to a friend who repeats it to me after school. Most of the time, they’re not in acute danger. They’re just burnt out, and no adult will give them an honest answer.
We’re so scared of this question as caregivers and teachers that we usually do one of two unhelpful things. We panic and treat it like a full-blown emergency, which teaches kids to keep the question to themselves next time. Or we throw out platitudes: “It gets better!” “You have so much to live for!” “Just stay positive!” Those lines sound good to us, but to a 16-year-old who’s only ever seen adults stressed about rent and laundry and car repairs, they feel like a lie.
I didn’t give Lila the “it gets better” speech that day. I told her I ask that same question some weeks, usually around parent-teacher conference season, when I’ve graded 90 lab reports, my feet hurt, and I forget to stop for groceries on the way home. I told her most days aren’t big, exciting, social media-worthy moments. Most days are folding socks and waiting at red lights and filling out permission slips. No one is happy all the time, and anyone who says they are is either lying or selling something.
I did ask the direct risk question I now use every time a kid brings this up, phrased to feel low-pressure instead of interrogative: “I’m glad you told me. Can I ask you one straightforward thing? Are you thinking about hurting yourself, or do things just feel really flat and pointless right now?” That framing gives kids two clear, non-judgmental options. It doesn’t make them feel like a problem for feeling bad, and it lets you tell the difference between a kid who needs immediate professional support and a kid who just needs someone to talk honestly.
Lila picked the second option immediately, so I didn’t walk her to the counselor. Instead, I nodded at the sticker on her laptop lid, a cartoon frog holding a foamy matcha latte. “You showed me that when it came in the mail, remember? You waited two weeks for it. Does that thing count for anything?”
She smiled, a tiny, quick thing, and traced the edge of the sticker with her finger. “I guess. It’s just a sticker.”
“Most of the good stuff is just stickers, I think,” I said. I pulled out my phone and opened the plain notes folder I keep, the one I started after a rough breakup a few years back. I don’t write long, thoughtful gratitude entries. I just type one tiny, unremarkable good thing every day, no exceptions. I scrolled through the last week and showed her: “Student gave me a lemon drop.” “Rain sounded good on the roof last night.” “Frozen pizza cooked extra crispy.” “Cat sat on my lap for 12 whole minutes.”
She read them for a minute, then asked why I bothered. I told her when every day feels like checking boxes, it’s easy to miss the tiny stuff that makes the boxes worth checking. You don’t need a big life purpose, or a dream career, or constant excitement to make life feel worth living. You just need small things to look for that are yours. It doesn’t fix the hard stuff. It doesn’t make homework shorter or rent cheaper or mean people stop being mean. It just gives you something small to hold onto while you deal with all the rest.
Before she left that day, I didn’t make her promise to come talk to me every week, or assign her any “gratitude homework.” I just gave her the extra lemon drop I keep in my desk drawer and told her she could stop by after school any time, no reason required. A week later, I mentioned the conversation to her mom in a quick check-in call, but I didn’t open with alarm or frame it as a crisis. I just said Lila had seemed a little run down lately, a lot of 10th graders feel that way this time of year, and maybe they could do one low-stakes thing a week with no talk of grades or college—get slushies after school, walk the dog around the park, whatever required no planning and no pressure. Her mom sighed and said she’d been so swamped with shifts she hadn’t even noticed. They started getting Taco Bell every Tuesday after Lila’s orthodontist appointments, she told me later.
I started a tiny routine in my homeroom after that, too. After morning announcements, we go around the room and say one tiny good thing from the last 24 hours. No big wins allowed—no “I got an A on my test” unless that’s really all you have. At first kids rolled their eyes and mumbled answers like “I didn’t miss the bus.” After a month, they were volunteering stuff before I even asked: “My little sister shared her fruit snack.” “The heating in the gym worked yesterday.” “My cat slept on my bed.” It takes three minutes a day. It doesn’t change any of the hard parts of being a teen right now. But it teaches them to look for small things instead of waiting around for some big, permanent “meaning” to show up.
I still keep the national crisis hotline number taped to the edge of my desk, big and bold. I still go to every mandatory training, and if a kid tells me they’re thinking of hurting themselves, I walk them to the counselor’s office before the bell rings, no exceptions. This quiet, ordinary kind of flatness doesn’t get talked about as much, but it’s far more common. Kids don’t need to be in crisis to deserve an honest answer to a hard question.
It’s April now. Lila still sits third row back by the wall, still turns every assignment in on time, still has weeks where everything feels like checking boxes. She stopped by after school last month, while I prepped for a frog dissection lab, and said she’d had three straight days where nothing felt fun or interesting, and she wondered if that would ever go away forever. I told her no, probably not. I still have those weeks, too. I gave her a lemon drop and changed the subject to the frog stickers she’d been ordering, and that was that.
Last Tuesday, she set a crumpled sticker on my desk on her way out the door. It was the same cartoon frog as her matcha one, but this one held a tiny microscope. She didn’t say anything, just waved and headed to her mom’s car. I stuck it on my laptop lid right next to my school ID badge.
I still don’t have a perfect answer to her original question. I don’t think anyone does. Some days I still stand in my kitchen at 10 p.m., staring at a sink full of dishes and a stack of ungraded labs, and wonder what the point of all the running around is. I don’t think the goal is to find one big, permanent answer that makes every day easy. I think the goal is to let kids ask the scary, honest questions out loud without panicking or lying to them, and to point out the tiny, stupid good things while they figure out their own answer.
Last week I saw Lila in the lunch line. She had the microscope frog sticker on her water bottle, right next to the matcha one. She waved when she saw me. That’s enough for now.
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