What To Do When Your Teen Asks ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’
I was scraping congealed taco cheese off the kitchen counter Tuesday night, the dishwasher humming low behind me, when my 16-year-old Leo looked up from his phone and asked, deadpan, “Do people really find life worth living?” I almost dropped the plastic spatula I was holding. It wasn’t that Leo had been acting off—he’d passed his driver’s permit test that morning, gotten a boba tea with his best friend after school, and had even put his own plate in the sink without being asked. This question just came out of nowhere, the kind of big, unblinking existential question teens pull out of TikTok comment threads and drop right in the middle of taco night.
My first gut reaction was to rush in and fix it: Of course it is! What made you say that? Are you okay? But I paused, wiped my hands on my jeans, and pulled out the chair next to him. I’ve been a middle school English teacher for 12 years, and I’ve gotten this question enough to know that rushing to reassure almost never works. “That’s such a good question,” I said. “What made you ask it right now?”
He shrugged, said everyone on his TikTok FYP is talking about how life is just a scam, how all adults are just miserable working 9 to 5 until they die. He said he looks at all the stuff he’s supposed to do—get good grades, get into college, get a job, pay off debt—and it feels like it’s not even worth starting. “I just want to know if you actually think it’s worth it,” he said. “No bullcrap.”
I didn’t give him the motivational speech I probably would have spat out five years ago. I said, “Honestly? Some days I don’t. Some days I hit snooze three times because I don’t want to deal with the leaky bathroom faucet that still hasn’t been fixed, the 30 ungraded essays sitting on my desk, the fact that both you and your sister left your muddy cleats right in the middle of the hallway for the third day in a row. Some days it feels like all I do is put out tiny, annoying fires, and I go to bed thinking that’s it? That’s the whole day?” He blinked, like he wasn’t expecting me to say that. I wasn’t done. “But most weeks, there’s at least one or two small things that make all the boring, annoying stuff worth it. What’s one small thing that felt good for you this week?”
He thought for a minute, then said when he and Javi got ice cream after the permit test, they drove around the back roads by the park with the windows down, and that new song he’s obsessed with came on, and they both screamed the lyrics so loud their throats hurt, and didn’t take any videos or post anything. It was just… theirs. That’s when I knew he got it, sort of. I said that’s the stuff for me, too. It’s not the big vacations or the work milestones I used to think would make life worth it. It’s the 10 minutes where nothing is required of you, and you just get to feel good.
I see this question pop up at least once a month in my classroom. Last semester, an 8th grader wrote it on the bottom of her exit ticket after we read a poem about being alive: “Do teachers actually think life is worth living, or are you all just faking it for us?” After class, she told me her older sister had dropped out of college six months prior, was working two minimum wage jobs to pay rent, and kept saying the whole system is rigged, so why bother. This girl was already stressing about high school, college, all the things she was supposed to do, and she’d started to think what’s the point if it’s just going to be hard forever.
I did the same thing with her I did with Leo: I didn’t lie. I told her I’d had whole months where I couldn’t name a single good thing, when I was going through a bad split a few years back, and all I did was work and sleep. I told her when that happens, that’s when you go ask for help, which is what I did. But even when things are mostly fine, most of life is boring. That’s not a failure, that’s just how life is. What we don’t talk about enough is that the boring parts are where the good stuff hides, the stuff that doesn’t get posted online.
The biggest mistake parents and teachers make with this question is panicking. It’s easy to jump straight to “are you hurting yourself?” and while that’s a question you should ask if your kid has been withdrawn or talking about harm, most of the time this isn’t an emergency. It’s a kid working out what they think about the world, now that they’re old enough to see it’s not the polished story adults told them when they were little.
Instead of panicking, try three small things. First, just say “That’s a really good question” instead of jumping to fix it. That lets them know it’s okay to ask big hard things, not just the easy ones. Second, don’t lie. If you had a bad week, say that. Kids can spot a fake positive speech from a mile away, and it just makes them think you won’t be honest with them, so they’ll stop asking. Third, ask them to name one tiny good thing from the past week, not a big life goal or achievement. It doesn’t have to be big—good gum, a funny text, a warm shower after a cold walk. That pulls them out of the big existential doomscrolling and back into the actual life they’re living right now.
After Leo and I talked that taco night, he grabbed his phone and headed up to his room to play video games. No big dramatic breakthrough, no hug, no “thanks mom that makes everything better.” Later that night, I checked his close friends story (he still lets me follow it, for now) and there was a blurry photo out the car window of the sunset over the back roads, captioned “worth it for this.”
I still get asked this question every few months, by Leo, by my students. No one has ever gotten a neat, final answer from me, because I don’t think there is one. I still ask it myself on the really hard days. But what I’ve learned is that the question itself isn’t a problem. It’s just part of growing up, figuring out what matters to you. And right now, that’s enough.
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