What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
I’m scraping congealed alfredo off pasta bowls into the compost bin last month, our golden retriever is breathing hot air on my ankle, and my 16-year-old Lila is leaning against the fridge picking at the frayed cuff of her hoodie when she asks it. “Do people really find life worth living?” she says, not dramatic, just tired, like she’s been turning the question over in her head for a week. “Like, most people? Not just the ones in movies or on Instagram?”
I’m halfway to blurting the automatic response—of course, honey, what a question—when I stop. I’ve been a part-time 10th grade English teacher for 8 years, and I’ve heard this question enough to know it’s not a request for a pep talk. Last semester, a quiet kid who sat in the back of my room and never spoke up turned in a journal response about The Catcher in the Rye that ended with the exact same line, no frills, no obvious cry for help on the page, just a plain question.
That day with Lila, I push the compost bin aside, sit down on the kitchen floor right next to the dog, and say what I actually think instead of the default parent script. “Honestly? No, not all the time,” I tell her. “Last Tuesday, after I spent three hours grading essays, paid $180 for an oil change I didn’t budget for, and remembered I forgot to buy your favorite cereal at the store, I laid on the couch after you and your dad fell asleep and thought this whole thing just felt like running in circles for no reason.”
Her eyes widen a little, like she didn’t expect me to say that. We’re taught as parents to pretend we’ve got it all figured out, that we never doubt the point of getting up every day. But kids can spot that fake stuff a mile away. I’ve seen it in my classroom: when a kid admits they’re struggling and the adult immediately launches into “everything is beautiful” talk, the kid shuts down right after that. They don’t come back to talk again.
I ask her what made her think of the question, and she tells me her health class had a discussion on mental health earlier that day, and everyone was joking about how all we do is go to school, get into debt, work until we die, and that’s it. No one said anything different. Her best friend just had a big fight with her mom, she failed her driver’s test for the second time, and she’s been scrolling TikTok lately where all the popular creators talk about how every generation is worse off than the last, what’s the point of even trying to plan for the future.
That makes sense. Kids are told from the time they’re little that life is this amazing gift, that if they just work hard they’ll be happy, and then they look around and see all the stress, all the bad news, all the people faking being happy online, and it feels like they’re the only ones who don’t buy into it. So when they ask this question, they’re not usually asking if they should keep going. They’re asking if it’s okay to admit that sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it, if everyone else is secretly feeling the same way.
The thing I’ve learned from both being a parent and a teacher is that the first step is just to not panic. Of course, if they’re talking about hurting themselves, you get help right away—that’s a different conversation. But most of the time, this is just a kid testing out what they really think about the world, not an emergency. You don’t have to come up with a great big answer to fix it. One specific thing I do now, instead of the generic “it’s all worth it” line, is just validate it first with three easy sentences I memorized after that first journal entry from my student: “That’s such a fair question. I’ve wondered that too. What’s got you thinking about it lately?” No prep needed, no fancy words, just letting them know you’re not going to judge them for asking.
After that night in the kitchen, we started this low-effort thing we do at Sunday dinner. We don’t do formal gratitude, that always feels forced to me. We just go around the table and say one thing that sucked this week, and one tiny thing that wasn’t the worst. It doesn’t have to be big. Last week, Lila’s sucked thing was getting rejected from the summer art program she applied for, and her not-worst thing was finding a half-eaten bag of Sour Patch Kids in the pocket of her winter jacket. My sucked thing was a back-to-back day of parent-teacher conferences that ran an hour over, and my not-worst thing was the cat curling up on my grading pile while I worked. It’s not going to fix climate change or student debt or any of the big heavy things that make kids ask this question, but it normalizes that life isn’t supposed to be 100% worth it 100% of the time. It’s okay to have a lot of suck, and a little bit of good, and that’s enough most days.
Last week, after the art program rejection, Lila asked the question again while we were folding laundry. “Do you ever still think it’s not worth it?” she said. I told her yeah, I do, sometimes. I told her most days, it’s just enough that there’s that one tiny not-worst thing, and that’s okay. She nodded, and ten minutes later she asked if we could go get ice cream on the way to pick up her dad from work.
We don’t have a big, neat answer to the question. Some days it feels worth it, some days it doesn’t. That’s the part we don’t tell kids enough, I think. We don’t have to fix the question to be with them in it.
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