What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
The dishwasher pod was still hanging from my fingers when my 16-year-old son Javi asked the question. It was Sunday night, the remains of our chocolate chip cookies sat crumbled on the counter, and the NFL game my husband was watching blared from the living room. Javi was leaning against the fridge, scrolling TikTok like he does every post-dinner, and he didn’t even look up when he said, “Hey. Do people actually find life worth living?”
I almost dropped the pod. I’m a middle school teacher, I’ve talked dozens of kids through this exact question in my classroom, but when your own kid asks it out of nowhere over Sunday dinner, your brain goes blank. I remembered what our school counselor told me years ago: don’t panic, don’t rush to fix it. So I shut the dishwasher, wiped my hand on my jeans, and pulled the spare dining chair next to him.
I asked what made him think about that. He said he’d been seeing dozens of videos online talking about how everyone’s just faking being happy, how all the good photos people post are lies, how the world’s just going downhill and all we do is work and pay bills until we die. “Everyone just keeps going, but why?” he said. “Are they actually glad they’re alive?”
I thought back to when I was 16, and I asked my mom the same question a few months after my best friend died in a car crash. She panicked, called my doctor, started badgering me about whether I wanted to hurt myself, and I shut down so fast I didn’t bring up any big hard questions again for 10 years. I didn’t want that for Javi. So I didn’t say “Of course life is worth living, what a silly thing to ask.” I said, “I don’t think most people feel that way every single day. I know I don’t.”
That made him look up from his phone.
I told him about my coworker Mary, a breast cancer survivor who got laid off this spring. She told me last month that the only thing that gets her out of bed most mornings is picking wild blackberries along the road near her house to make jam for her grandkids. She said some days she doesn’t think it’s worth it, but the blackberries taste good enough to keep going another day. I told him about the bad day I had two weeks earlier, when I cried in my car after school because the district cut our free snack program, three of my 7th graders came to school hungry, and I got a bad evaluation for spending 20 minutes talking a kid through a panic attack instead of sticking to my lesson plan. I stopped for a cherry slushie on the way home, and I sat there for 10 minutes watching a group of little kids chase a duck around the gas station parking lot. That 10 minutes was the only thing that made that day worth it. I didn’t feel some big grand rush of gratitude. I just thought, “Okay, that was nice. I can get through tonight.”
I tell parents this all the time when they come to me worried after their kid asks this question, and it’s all simple, low-friction stuff that anyone can do. First, check in plainly. After you let them talk, just ask, “Are you feeling like you don’t want to be here right now?” Asking straight doesn’t put the idea in their head, it just tells you if you need to reach out to a counselor or doctor right away. If they say no, they’re just sorting through the question, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean they’re broken, it just means they’re growing up and thinking about big stuff that doesn’t have easy answers.
Second, don’t serve up generic positivity. Telling them “just think positive” or “you have so much to be grateful for” just makes them shut down. They already know all the hard stuff they’re going through, and all the hard stuff in the world. Instead of giving a big, perfect answer, give them small, unglamorous bits of your own. You don’t have to talk about getting married or your dream job or big achievements. Talk about the way your dog greets you at the door, or the first warm day in spring, or the way your favorite song comes on the radio just when you need it.
Third, you don’t have to answer the question for them. It’s okay to say you don’t have the big answer either. Most of us don’t. The question is part of figuring out what matters to you, and that takes your whole life.
By the end of that Sunday night conversation, Javi didn’t suddenly jump up and declare how much he loved life. He just nodded, went back to scrolling TikTok, and grabbed the last cookie before heading upstairs. A week later, I found his notebook open on the kitchen counter when I was cleaning up. He had a half-page list titled “things that are kind of worth it”: cold fries from McDonald’s, mom’s cookies, our dog’s cold nose on my ankle, bad early 2000s rom-coms, skateboarding down the empty hill by the park after dark. No big stuff, just small things.
He still has bad days, he still complains that everything sucks, and he still brings the question up every once in a while. I still don’t have a neat answer for him, and he hasn’t landed on one for himself yet. That’s okay. I still ask myself the same question some gray Mondays when I’m dragging myself out of bed. Right now, what works is letting the question sit there, talking about the small good bits, and not rushing to fix anything. That’s enough for now.
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