What To Do When Your Teen Asks ‘Is Life Really Worth Living?’ A High School Teacher’s Experience
The rain streaks the windows of my portable classroom, my oat milk latte has gone cold, and I’m stacking 10th grade essays about social media’s impact when the knock comes. Fifteen minutes after the final bell, most kids are already on the bus or grabbing fast food with friends, but Mia’s hovering in the doorframe, hood up, twisting the strap of her backpack until her knuckles are white. She says she doesn’t want to turn in her permission slip for the zoo field trip next week.
I ask if there’s an issue with the cost, and she shakes her head, shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and says, “Why would I go? Do you actually think life is worth living? Like, really?”
I’ve been teaching long enough to remember the first time a student asked me this, seven years ago. I panicked. I rambled about how she had her whole life ahead, her family loved her, she was so smart and had so much potential. She just nodded, mumbled okay, and left, and I never got another real conversation out of her after that. I’ve learned a lot since then. This time, I didn’t reach for the crisis handbook or the fake encouraging smile. I just pushed the stack of essays off the empty chair next to my desk and said, “Come sit down. That’s such a heavy question. I’ve wondered that myself, actually.”
Mia sat, and started talking. Every day is the same, she said. Wake up at 6:30, sit through six classes, do two hours of homework, scroll TikTok until 11, sleep. Her mom works two jobs right now after getting laid off from the hospital, so they don’t eat dinner together more than once a week. She broke up with her boyfriend last month, and all her friends seem happier than her—posting beach trips, college campus visits, perfect group selfies. She feels like she’s just waiting for something big and exciting that’s never going to come. “What’s the point of all this if it just keeps being the same?” she said. I offered her a peppermint from the jar I keep for kids with test anxiety, and she took it, unwrapping it slow, like she was buying time to keep talking.
I’ve had this exact conversation three times in the last semester alone. Right now, kids grow up drowning in messages that life should be constantly fulfilling, exciting, successful. If they don’t feel that buzzing, happy high all the time, they assume something is broken—either with them, or with life itself. Most parents and teachers panic when this question comes up. They either jump straight to crisis mode (which is necessary in some cases, more on that later) or jump straight to toxic positivity, which shuts the conversation down for good.
What’s worked for me, and what I tell parents to try, is a lot smaller. First, you don’t have to fix the question. You just have to let it exist. The phrase I use, that anyone can pull out, is “It makes total sense to ask that. Most people do, at some point.” No denial, no rushing to reassure, just acknowledgment. That one line takes all the weight out of the question. Kids stop feeling like they’re broken for thinking it.
Second, share your own small, boring version of the same doubt. I didn’t tell Mia about any big trauma I’ve been through. I just said, “Last week I spent all Sunday grading 60 essays, my partner was out of town, I burned the frozen pizza I ordered for dinner, and I sat on my couch thinking, ‘Is this really all there is? All this work, all this mess, just to do it again next week?’” That’s it. Just a normal, boring bad day. It let Mia see she wasn’t the only one who felt this way, that it wasn’t just a teen problem or a her problem.
Third, forget big life purposes. Focus on tiny, unremarkable good things. We spend so much time pushing kids toward big wins—good grades, college acceptances, perfect sports stats—that we train them to think only big things matter. But most of life is small, and that’s okay. I asked Mia what was the last thing she did that felt even a little bit good, not for school, not for Instagram, just for her. She thought for a minute, then said she used to draw little frogs on the margins of all her notebooks in middle school, and last summer at her grandma’s, she sat on the porch and drew a whole page of them, and that felt nice. She hadn’t done it since school started, she said. She didn’t have time.
I suggested one tiny thing, no big commitment: every night before bed, just write down one thing that was even just okay that day. It didn’t have to be happy, or great. It just had to not be bad. It could be “the vending machine gave me an extra chip” or “my dog met me at the door after school.” That’s it. No journaling, no therapy homework, just one tiny line.
Two weeks later, she dropped a crumpled piece of paper on my desk after class. It was a drawing of a chubby green frog holding a cup of lemonade, with a tiny speech bubble that said “Worth it for this.” I taped it next to my computer, and it’s still there.
I tell parents all the time: first, if your kid talks about hurting themselves, don’t mess around. Get professional help immediately, no question. But most of the time, this question isn’t a cry for a big intervention. It’s just a kid figuring out that life isn’t the fairy tale we sold them as little kids, that a lot of it is routine, and hard, and unexciting. That’s a normal part of growing up.
Mia still has bad days. Last month, she stopped by my room after school and said she’d spent a whole weekend in bed, didn’t do any homework, and wondered the same thing all over again. But now she keeps a little list of tiny good things in her phone notes, and she draws a frog when she feels stuck, and most days, that’s enough.
The question doesn’t have to be answered once and for all. Some days life feels very worth living. Some days it just feels okay. Some days it feels like too much. We don’t have to give our kids a grand, perfect answer. We just have to help them hold onto enough small, good moments to get through until the feeling shifts.
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