What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
I was scraping leftover penne into the compost bin last month, the kitchen still reeking of the garlic bread I’d burned 20 minutes earlier, when my 16-year-old leaned against the fridge and asked the question out of nowhere. His soccer tournament sticker was peeling off the fridge door, the hum of the ice maker was drowning out the playlist he had on low, and he didn’t even look up from his phone when he said it: “Do people really find life worth living? Like, actually.”
I almost dropped the pasta bowl. My first instinct was to blurt out the line I’d been programmed to say: Of course! Life is such a gift! But I caught myself. I remembered being 16, sitting at this same kitchen table asking my own mom the same question after a bad day of practice and friend drama, and her saying I was being dramatic and needed to stop moping and take out the trash. I never asked her anything that big again.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat down on the cold linoleum floor next to him, instead of hovering by the sink like I usually do when I’m in the middle of cleanup. I didn’t say anything for a minute, just let the question hang there. This isn’t the first hard question he’s asked lately. Since his best friend moved across the country at the start of the school year, and he loaded up on AP classes that leave him doing homework until 11pm every night, he’s been questioning everything: why we go to work, why we fight about politics, why anyone bothers posting happy photos on Instagram when everyone’s tired. His therapist told me a while back that this kind of existential questioning is just part of how a teen’s brain develops, that it’s not automatically a red flag for depression, even though it’s scary for parents. Most of the time, she said, kids aren’t asking for an answer—they’re asking if it’s okay to ask the question at all.
That gave me the courage to say what I actually thought, instead of the scripted pep talk. I told him, “I don’t think everyone does, all the time. I definitely have days where I don’t.” He looked up from his phone then, surprised. I told him about the previous week, when I had three back-to-back work meetings, the dog threw up on the rug right before my biggest client call, and I forgot to buy milk for his cereal in the morning, and I stood in the middle of the living room after everyone left for school and thought, Is this really just it? Dishes and missed deadlines and cleaning up throw up, forever?
Then I told him what I do think, that it’s not one big grand thing that makes it worth it. It’s not getting into college or getting a good job or having a perfect family, the stuff all the ads and college counselors tell you to chase. It’s the tiny stupid stuff that you barely even notice until you stop to list it. I told him about that Saturday we drove 20 minutes out to the dumpy donut shop by the highway, and he got that blueberry cake donut covered in sprinkles, and he had a crumb on his chin and laughed so hard he snort-laughed when I took a blurry photo of him. That two minutes, I said, that made that whole bad week worth it. That’s the stuff that adds up.
Before this, I would have faked my way through a perfect answer and sent him off to do his homework. Now I know a couple small concrete things that work, when your kid asks this kind of question. First, always ask directly if they’re hurting: I said to him, “I’m just checking—are you feeling like life isn’t worth it for you right now?” It feels scary to ask that question out loud, but it’s the most important thing you can do. He said no, he was just watching a TikTok thread where a bunch of people were saying they’re just faking being happy, and it got him thinking. If he’d said yes, I would have called his therapist that night and taken the next step, no questions asked.
Second, don’t fake being positive. It doesn’t help anyone when you pretend your life is perfect and all questions have easy answers. The phrase I’ve started using that works better than any pep talk is, “That’s such a big question, I’m glad you asked me.” It doesn’t pressure you to have an answer right away, and it lets your kid know their question matters.
Third, after you talk, do something small together to anchor the question in real life. That day, we both pulled out our phones and typed up a quick list of five tiny things that had felt good that week, no big stuff allowed. His list was: the new Olivia Rodrigo track, the way our cat curls up on his homework to nap, cold lemonade after mowing the lawn, that TikTok of the golden retriever that can’t catch a ball, that blueberry donut. Mine was pretty similar. We stuck the list to the fridge with a magnet, and it’s still there, half covered by homework reminders.
A week later, I picked him up from school, and he got in the car and said his history teacher talked about the same thing that day—how most people don’t love every part of their life, but they love enough of the small parts to keep going. He put his headphones on after that, and we didn’t talk about it again.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. He’ll probably ask harder questions as he gets older, and I still won’t have perfect answers. Some weeks he’s still quiet and tired and questions everything, and some weeks he’s out with friends laughing until 9pm and comes home with slushie stains on his jeans. What I do know is that sitting on the cold kitchen floor, being honest instead of giving a fake answer, that was enough. It doesn’t fix the big questions, but it lets your kid know they don’t have to answer them alone.
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