What happens when a student asks what the point is: a teacher’s take on finding life worth living
The classroom was doing that afternoon hum—pencils moving, a chair creaking, the radiator ticking—when Marcus looked up from his worksheet and said, “I don’t really get why we’re doing this.” I assumed he meant the grammar exercise. He shook his head. “Not the worksheet. Like… anything. What’s the point?”
He wasn’t dramatic about it. That was the unsettling part. He said it the way you’d ask where the pencils are kept. The room didn’t go silent; a couple of kids glanced over and then went back to work. Marcus was fifteen, a solid middle-of-the-road student, not a kid with red flags. He played soccer at lunch. He joked around in the hallway. And here he was, perfectly calm, wondering aloud whether any of it mattered.
I sat down on the edge of the desk across from him. “That’s kind of a big question for a Tuesday,” I said, which made him half-smile.
I didn’t have an answer. That’s the first thing I want parents and teachers to know: you don’t need one. The instinct is to manage the moment, to say “Life is beautiful” or “You have so much ahead of you”—but those responses land like a dropped tray. Loud, sudden, and not really helpful. What I said instead was, “I think I’ve asked that more times than I can count. I’m not sure I have an answer, but I’m still around.” He nodded, like that was good enough for now, and went back to his work.
The question of whether life is worth living doesn’t belong only to adults in crisis. It’s a developmental event. Kids start asking it—or versions of it—around middle school, when their brains become capable of abstract thought. They can suddenly imagine how the world works, where they fit into it, and how much of it they don’t control. That’s new wiring, and it’s uncomfortable. One day they’re asking for a later bedtime; the next they’re staring at the ceiling wondering if any of it adds up.
My daughter asked me something similar two years ago. She was eleven, sitting on the kitchen floor tying her shoes for school, and out of nowhere she said, “If everyone dies, why does anybody do anything?” It was six in the morning. I hadn’t had coffee. I sat down next to her and said, “I actually think that’s a really good question, and I don’t know.” We sat there for a minute in silence—a long minute for a six a.m.—and then she said, “Okay,” and we went to school.
I’ve thought about that morning a lot. What worked wasn’t an answer; it was that I stayed in it with her. The worst thing we can do when a child asks the big question is panic. Not because they’re in danger—though sometimes they are, and we should pay attention—but because panic shuts the question down. It tells them, “We don’t talk about that here,” and they’ll just carry it around by themselves.
Here’s what I’ve learned to say instead. “I don’t know” is a fine sentence. “I wonder about that too” is better. “You don’t have to figure this out today” is the most useful thing I can offer a fifteen-year-old—because so much of the dread comes from feeling like they need to solve it right now. Life’s worth is not a worksheet with a due date.
There’s also something concrete we can do that sounds too simple but isn’t: we can make the case for staying around in small, specific ways. I asked Marcus, a few days after that Tuesday, if he’d had any good moments lately. He gave me an embarrassed shrug. I told him about what I’d noticed—that he laughed at something funny during last period, that he’d finished a history reading he said he hated. I wasn’t inventing things; I just noticed them. Kids think the “point” has to be cosmic, but the actual evidence is usually in the ordinary seconds of a regular day.
At home, the equivalent might be a dinnertime practice of having everyone—including the adults—name one thing from that day that they’d be sorry to have missed. It needs to be that specific. “What did you notice today?” feels manufactured if it’s forced, but if it becomes a normal question along the lines of “How was school?”, it starts to feel like texture. One of my students’ parents does this in the car on the way home, because the car is a low-pressure box: no eye contact, no expectations, just both of them looking out the windshield.
This isn’t about optimism. I’m not a cheerleader for the universe, and I don’t think kids need me to be. What I believe is that the question “Is life worth living?” is almost never answered in the abstract. It gets answered in pieces—a good sandwich, a friend’s inside joke, finally understanding something in physics, a season of a show you wait for each week. The pieces add up slowly, and they’re unreliable. Some weeks there are no pieces at all.
That’s the honest part I think kids deserve. There will be stretches where the answer feels like no. I’ve had them. The goal isn’t to glue a smiley face over the dark question—it’s to help them stay in the room long enough to see a few more bright spots. To keep them around until the answer shifts, because it does shift, even if it never becomes a permanent yes.
Marcus didn’t change overnight. He still had flat days. But he started asking me different questions—not “what’s the point” but “how do people get through the pointless days?” That’s an easier one to take seriously. I told him I make a list. It sounds silly, but in my phone I keep a note called “Fine Things”—not joyful things, just fine ones. A good plum. The way the hallway looks at 3 p.m. when the light slants in. Wednesdays, because of the pretzels in the cafeteria. I showed him the list once, briefly, not making a big deal of it. He said, “That’s weird.” And then, “Can I see it again?”
I don’t know if he made his own list. I don’t know if he thinks life is worth living, whatever that means to him. But he’s still coming to school, still asking questions, still getting through the afternoons. That’s enough for now. Probably that’s always enough.
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