What To Do When Your Teen Asks ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’
I was wiping tomato sauce off the kitchen counter last Tuesday, the dishwasher humming behind me, when my 16-year-old looked up from his phone slouched on the table and asked, “Do people really find life worth living?”
I almost dropped my sponge. We’d spent an hour that afternoon practicing parallel parking at the empty grocery store down the road, he’d aced his permit test, we’d gotten milkshakes on the way home. This wasn’t a conversation I’d scheduled for post-dinner cleanup. My first instinct was to blurt out Of course! What a question! But that felt like a lie, so I wiped my hand on my jeans and pulled out the chair next to him.
I asked what brought it on. He turned his phone to show me a Reddit thread he’d been scrolling: 150 adults answering the question “Are you happy you’re alive?” Most of the top comments weren’t the gushing “I love my life and my amazing family” takes he’d seen in school presentations. Most said they get through the week for the weekend, or for their pets, or because it’s too much trouble to not. One said “I don’t know that it’s worth it, but it’s not worth leaving either, so here we are.”
He said he sees this everywhere now. TikTok about climate change that makes it sound like the world will be unlivable by the time he’s my age. Threads from new graduates complaining they’ll never afford a house, never pay off student loans, work 9-to-5 just to afford enough takeout to keep going. “What’s the point if that’s what it is?” he asked.
I thought about lying, about telling him that all that negativity is just online, that his life will be amazing if he works hard. But I remembered being 16, sitting in my bedroom after school, thinking the exact same thing. I remembered being 22, working 60 hours a week at a coffee shop, sleeping on a friend’s couch, staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. wondering why I was bothering. So I told him that. I told him I’ve had whole months where I didn’t think life was all that worth living, that some weeks I still do. The hard parts don’t go away just because you grow up.
Then I pulled up the notes app on my phone, scrolled to the very bottom where I keep a list I’ve never shown anyone. I keep it for the bad days, when everything feels too heavy and all I can see is the laundry that needs folding and the bill that’s due and the work I haven’t finished. It’s just a list of tiny, stupid things: the way our cat curls up on the corner of my laptop when I work, the crunch of a really good apple, the sound of my kid snorting when he laughs too hard at a bad meme, the way my old sweatpants fit just right after I wash them. I handed him the phone and let him read.
He scrolled through for a minute, then handed it back. “All that’s just tiny stuff,” he said. I told him yeah, that’s the point. I spent most of my 20s waiting for life to start, waiting for the big job and the big house and the big adventure that would make it all worth it. When I got it, it was still just a bunch of tiny stuff, most of it messy, some of it bad. But the tiny good stuff adds up faster than the big stuff ever did.
The thing I’ve learned as a parent, that I share with other parents when they tell me their kid asked this same question, is that you don’t need a perfect answer. You don’t need to fix existential dread for them in 10 minutes over the kitchen table. What you do need to do is not shut them down. The first concrete step is: don’t panic right away. It’s not always a cry for help (though you should always follow up with “are you feeling this way right now? Do you need to talk to someone?” if you’re worried). A lot of the time, it’s just a kid who’s growing up, starting to see the messiness of the world that we adults hide from them, and he’s trying to make sense of it. If you jump straight to cheerleading or panic, he’ll never ask again.
Second, be honest. Faking constant positivity doesn’t help anyone. It just makes your kid think they’re wrong for feeling confused, that something’s wrong with them for not seeing how amazing life is supposed to be. Admit that it’s confusing for you too.
Third, do something small instead of giving a speech. I didn’t rush to sign my kid up for extra counseling right away (though again, if he’d said he was hurting, I would have in a second). I just invited him to make his own tiny list, if he wanted. He doesn’t have to share it with anyone. It just sits in his phone for the days when he can’t see anything good.
Last week, we were driving to get tacos after soccer practice, and he pulled out his phone and showed me three entries he’d added already: when my favorite song comes on shuffle right when I get in the car, when the coach lets us leave practice 10 minutes early, how crispy the shell is at this taco place. He still says he thinks a lot of adult life sounds terrible. He still posts depressing memes on his Instagram story sometimes. I don’t blame him. A lot of it is terrible.
Last night, he left his phone on the kitchen counter when he went out to meet his friends, and his list was still open. I snuck a quick look, and the last entry was “when mom doesn’t yell about me leaving my hoodie on the couch.” I added that line to my list when I went to bed that night.
I still don’t know if I gave him the right answer. Some days I still ask myself the same question. But so far, this works: being honest instead of faking it, looking for the tiny stuff together, not forcing a neat answer when there isn’t one. That’s enough for right now.
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