What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
I was scraping congealed cheddar off my 16-year-old Leo’s pasta bowl last month when he said it, not looking up from his phone where he’d been scrolling a thread of elderly people talking about their biggest life regrets. “Do people actually really find life worth living?”
I almost dropped the ceramic bowl into the sink. I’ve taught 10th grade for 12 years, so I’ve heard variations of this question a hundred times in journal entries and after-class check-ins. But when it comes out of your own kid’s mouth, across your own kitchen table with rain streaking the window, all the default responses fly right out of your head. My first instinct was to blurt out “Of course! How could you even ask that?” but I bit it back. I’d seen what that response does: kids shut down, tuck the question away, and don’t ask again.
I leaned against the counter instead, wiped my wet hands on my jeans, and said, “What made you ask that?”
He turned the phone toward me, showing the 92-year-old woman in the clip saying she’d spent 40 years working a desk job she hated to pay for a house she only got to retire in for five years before her husband died. “Everyone online is either rich and posting their perfect vacations or ranting about how the whole world is garbage and we’re all just going to die from climate change,” he said. “No one ever says anything in between. So I’m asking: is it actually worth it?”
I sat down across from him, and told him the truth, something I never would have said to a kid when I first started teaching or parenting. I said, “Some days I don’t think it is.”
He looked up immediately, surprised. I don’t think anyone had ever said that to him before. We spend so much time selling kids the idea that life is this amazing gift full of adventure and purpose, we forget to admit that most days are just a bunch of annoying stuff strung together: grading papers, forgetting groceries, mopping up dog vomit, sitting in traffic. I told him about that Tuesday two weeks before, where all of that happened in the same 12 hours, and by 9pm I was sitting on the floor of the laundry room thinking, This is just what it is? A million little chores no one thanks you for before you die?
“But then,” I said, “I was walking the dog before school the next morning, and Mrs. Henderson’s lilac bush at the end of the street was blooming. I stopped for three minutes just to stand there and smell it, and that three minutes made all of that Tuesday garbage worth it. Not because it was some big magical moment, just because it was nice.”
We sat there for another 10 minutes, just throwing out small, stupid nice things. He thought of the vanilla iced coffee he buys on his way to work every Friday, and late night drives with his girlfriend where they get street tacos and don’t talk about college apps. I thought of finding a forgotten mint in the pocket of my winter coat, and the way my favorite old song comes on the radio when I’m having a bad day. No big speeches, no grand revelations about the meaning of life. Just a list of small things.
Over the years I’ve worked with kids, I’ve learned this question almost never needs a big answer. Most of the time, it’s not a cry for emergency mental health care (though of course, if your kid says they’re thinking of hurting themselves, you get help right away— that’s non-negotiable). It’s just what teenagers do: they’re starting to question all the unexamined ideas adults pass along, and they want an honest answer, not a motivational poster line.
The biggest mistake adults make is panicking and rushing to fix the question before the kid has even finished asking it. You don’t have to have a perfect answer. You just have to not lie. If you’ve never had a day where you wondered the same thing, you’re not being honest. The second mistake is only talking about the big stuff: graduating, getting married, buying a house, having kids. All of that is so far away for a 15 or 16 year old, it might as well be on Mars. The stuff that matters is the small, unphotogenic stuff no one posts about.
If you’re not sure what to do after you answer, one low-effort thing I suggest to parents and my students is to start a running list in your phone. Just one line a day, write down one small thing that didn’t suck. It can be as tiny as “my toast was perfectly crispy” or “my cat curled up on my lap.” It doesn’t require any extra time, and after a month you’ve got a list of things to look at when you’re asking that big question again. One of my students told me after she did this for two months, she started looking for the small thing during the day, instead of only noticing all the bad stuff.
Last week, Leo left his phone on the kitchen counter when he ran out to meet his friends. A notification popped up from his notes app, and I glanced over without meaning to. It was that same list we started that rainy night, still growing: 1. Iced coffee on Fridays. 2. Lilacs smell good. 3. Street tacos after late drives. 4. Mom’s chocolate chip cookies when they’re still warm. 5. Beating Javi at Mario Kart. 6. Rain on the roof when I don’t have to get up early.
I didn’t say anything to him about it when he got home. Some nights we add a new line after dinner, some nights he says he can’t think of a single thing, and I just say me neither tonight. The question hasn’t gone away, and I don’t expect it to. I don’t have a permanent, perfect answer for him. I just know that pretending it’s not a question worth asking doesn’t do anyone any good.
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