What to do when your teen asks ‘Do people really find life worth living?’
I was scraping burnt cheddar off the Tuesday night nacho baking sheet when my 16-year-old daughter Lila leaned against the fridge, socks slouching down to her ankles, phone face down on the counter, and asked, “Do people really find life worth living?”
I almost dropped the scraper. My first thought was the same any parent or teacher would have: Is she hurting? Do I need to call our therapist right now? But when I looked up, her face wasn’t tight with that desperate edge I’ve seen on middle schoolers who stay after class to talk. It was just tired. That week, she’d failed her AP Bio test, her best friend bailed on the concert they’d saved six months for to go on a beach trip with her new boyfriend, and her favorite pothos plant on the bedroom windowsill had turned yellow and died overnight. She wasn’t in crisis. She was just confused.
I opened my mouth to say the thing we all default to: “Of course it is! Just look at all the good things you have.” But she rolled her eyes before I got half the words out, pushed off the fridge, and went to sit on the bottom step of the stairs leading to her room, shoulders hunched. As an 8th grade teacher, I’d heard this question twice in the last month alone. A quiet 7th grader who draws cats on all her notebooks stayed after class a few weeks back and asked, almost in a whisper, why everyone on TikTok acts like life is nonstop fun when she just feels bored most days. I knew then that jumping to fix the question only makes kids shut down. They don’t need a pep talk. They need an honest answer.
I went to the hall closet where I keep my old high school boxes, dug out the beat-up leather journal I carried when I was Lila’s age, and brought it back to the stairs. I sat down next to her, didn’t say anything for a minute, just flipped past pages of bad poetry and concert ticket stubs until I found what I was looking for. Dated October 12, 1998, written in smudged blue gel pen: “Do adults actually like their lives? Or do they just lie about it? I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t think life is that great most of the time. Everyone else acts like it’s so good.” I read it out loud to her.
She turned and stared at me, like I’d just shown her a top-secret government file. “You actually wrote that?” I nodded. I told her I remembered that week: my boyfriend broke up with me, I failed my driver’s test twice, my mom forgot my birthday because she was busy with my little brother’s emergency tonsil surgery. I thought I was broken for feeling what I felt.
I pulled out my phone and texted my three closest friends, no context beyond: “My kid asked if people really find life worth living. Can you tell me one thing that’s been dragging you down this week, no fluff.” Within 10 minutes, I had three replies. Lila thinks all three of these women have perfect lives: one runs a cute bakery she posts about on Instagram, one just got a big promotion at work, one just got back from a two-week trip to Portugal. Their replies were nothing like the posts Lila sees.
The baker wrote: “I cried in my car after dropping my kid at soccer practice this morning. My rent went up 30% and I don’t know if I can keep the bakery open. Most days I just go home and fall asleep on the couch before I even make dinner.” The woman with the promotion wrote: “I still wake up some days and regret not having kids. I don’t talk about it because everyone says I’m so lucky to have my freedom. Some days freedom just feels empty.” The one back from Portugal wrote: “My mom’s dementia is getting worse, she didn’t recognize me when I visited last weekend. I’ve been drinking too much every night to forget it. I don’t tell anyone because they say I should be happy I got to go on the trip.”
We read all three out loud. Lila didn’t say anything for a long time, then she said, “I thought everyone else was fine. I only see all the good stuff everyone posts. I thought I was wrong for not feeling happy all the time.”
That’s the core of it, isn’t it? We don’t mean to mislead kids, but we hide all the messy, boring, hard parts of being alive. We jump to reassure them the second they ask a hard question, because their doubt makes us uncomfortable. We tell them life is worth living if you just do the right things, but we never admit that most days, life is just okay. Some days it’s bad. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, but it also doesn’t mean you have to be happy 24/7 to be normal.
The practical part is simpler than you think. First, always start by checking in: ask “What made you think of that?” to make sure they’re not planning to hurt themselves. If they are, get help right away, no exceptions. But if they’re just confused, don’t rush to fix it. You don’t have to give them a perfect answer. Share a small, honest truth about your own experience, instead of pretending you never feel the same way. It doesn’t have to be a big trauma dump—something as small as “I sat in my car after grocery shopping yesterday for 10 minutes because I just didn’t feel like dealing with dinner, and I wondered what the point of all the busy work was” works. That trick I did with texting friends is super easy, too. It takes 10 minutes, and it’s way more powerful than anything you can say alone, because it shows them they’re not the only one asking.
It’s not like after that night on the stairs, Lila never felt bad again. Last week, she came home from school, threw her bag down, and said “Life still sucks most of the time.” But then she grinned and added “But the chocolate chip cookies we baked on Sunday were good. And the cat sleeps on my feet when I study. So I guess it’s okay some of the time.” We still haven’t had some big, perfect moment where she decides life is 100% worth living every single day. I don’t think we need to. For right now, it’s enough that she knows the question itself isn’t wrong. And she’s not the only one asking it.
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