When Teens Ask ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’: A High School Teacher’s Honest Take
The rain had left streaky gray marks all over the room 214 windows, and I was halfway through a stack of lopsided cell model projects, my third matcha of the day gone lukewarm, when Javi hung back after the final bell. Most kids bolt for the bus or the parking lot before the echo dies down, but he lingered by the door, hood pulled up over his dark curly hair, picking at a peeling sticker on the spine of his biology notebook. The formaldehyde fumes from the frog dissection closet still hung faint in the air, and I could hear the soccer coach yelling across the field through the cracked window.
I thought he’d forgotten a homework assignment, or wanted to ask about retaking the quiz he’d bombed the week before. Instead, he kicked a loose tile on the floor and said it quiet, like he was admitting he’d skipped lunch: “Do people really find life worth living? Like, actually. Not just the stuff people post to make it look good.”
My first instinct was to blurt out the easy answer, the one adults are supposed to give: Of course! It gets better! You have so much to look forward to! I bit it back. I was 16 once, too, and I remember asking my dad almost the exact same question after watching a documentary about climate collapse and spending three hours scrolling threads about entry level jobs that required five years experience. He’d told me I was being dramatic, that I’d understand when I was older, and I never asked him anything that big again.
I leaned against the lab counter instead of sitting down behind my desk, which always makes kids feel like they’re in trouble, and grabbed the extra salted peanut butter granola bar I keep stashed for kids who skip breakfast. I slid it across the table to him. “Some days I don’t,” I said. “Some days I drag myself out of bed, grade 40 lab reports, burn dinner, and go to bed wondering why I bothered. Other days I do. What made you ask?”
He pulled out the chair at the nearest lab station and sat down, hood slipping back a little. His older sister graduated from state college two years ago, he said, with a business degree and a 3.7 GPA. She works 60 hour weeks at a marketing firm downtown, pays half the rent to their parents because she can’t afford her own apartment, and comes home most nights complaining about her boss. His parents fight about medical bills and car repairs at the dinner table at least once a week. On TikTok, half the videos he sees are people his age or a little older saying no one our generation will ever own a house, that retirement support will be gone by the time we age out of work, that the planet’s going to be unlivable in 30 years anyway. He’s spending three hours a night on AP homework right now, studying for SATs that feel like they matter more than anything, and he can’t see what the payoff is supposed to be. “It just feels like all you do is work until you die,” he said, and peeled the granola bar open slow.
I’ve had this conversation at least a dozen times in 11 years teaching 10th grade. A lot of adults hear that question and panic. They assume it’s an immediate crisis, that the kid is suicidal, that they have to call a counselor or a therapist right that second, or they assume it’s just edgy teen angst and brush it off. Sometimes it is a crisis, of course. But most of the time, it’s just what happens when a kid’s brain grows into the ability to see the whole world, not just their own corner of it. When you’re 10, life is recess and pizza nights and the new video game you want for Christmas. By 15 or 16, you can grasp abstract problems, you can see the stress your parents try to hide, you can read essays about student debt and climate change, and you don’t have decades of small, good moments stacked up to balance all that heavy stuff out. We spend so much time talking to kids about grades and test scores and college acceptances, the big checkmarks on the official life checklist, that they start to think those are the only things that make life matter. If those checkmarks look impossible, or like they don’t lead to anything good anyway, the whole thing feels empty.
I didn’t lie to him and tell him all the big stuff fixes itself. I didn’t tell him he’d get a great job and a big house and everything would work out, because that’s not true for a lot of people, and kids can smell that kind of lie from a mile away. “A lot of the big stuff is broken right now,” I told him. “I can’t promise you it’ll all get fixed. But the stuff that makes most days worth showing up for isn’t the stuff on the college brochures. It’s the tiny stuff no one posts online.” I told him about the group of freshmen who’d spent 20 minutes after class two days before, chasing a lost baby sparrow up and down the hallway, cheering so loud the math teacher next door came over to see what was going on when it finally flew out the open door. I told him about last weekend, when my roommates and I made canned tomato soup that was way too salty and rewatched a terrible 1995 dinosaur movie, and my roommate laughed so hard root beer came out her nose. I told him about a kid I taught five years ago who stopped by last month with a single lumpy tomato he’d grown in a milk jug on his fire escape, because he remembered we’d talked about container gardening during our unit on photosynthesis. None of these things are achievements. None of them show up on a resume. But they add up.
That’s the thing adults get wrong when these questions come up. You don’t need a philosophy degree, or a perfect answer, or a plan to fix every systemic problem that’s scaring your kid. You just have to not lie to them, and not shut the conversation down. The line I use, that works more often than any big speech, is simple: “Some days feel like a total drag. But there’s usually one small thing each day that makes it worth getting out of bed. What’s yours been lately?” It doesn’t pressure them to cheer up, it doesn’t dismiss how they feel, and it turns their attention to the small stuff they already care about, the stuff they’ve been taught to ignore because it doesn’t count as progress. For Javi, it was Saturday pancakes with his dad, the ones with extra chocolate chips that his dad burns the edges of on purpose, and the stupid Roblox obstacle courses he and his best friend build after homework instead of studying. He shrugged when he said it, like it was silly that those counted, but his shoulders relaxed a little, like he’d been carrying a weight he didn’t know he was allowed to put down.
I did stop by the school counselor’s office the next morning, quiet, to ask what I should watch for, because you don’t take chances with kids. She told me what I already knew, more or less: if a kid asking this question has also stopped hanging out with friends they used to love, given away their favorite games or clothes, started talking about how no one would miss them if they were gone, or started skipping class or sleeping all the time, that’s the sign to connect them to professional support right away. But a kid who stays after class to ask you the hard question, who still gets excited about pancakes or bad video games? They’re not in crisis. They’re just paying attention.
I passed that along to my sister last month, after she called me panicking because her 14 year old daughter mumbled over dinner that “none of this matters” after getting a B on her algebra test. My sister’s first instinct was to ground her for being ungrateful, then to book an emergency therapy appointment. Instead, she waited an hour, brought her a mug of her favorite hot cocoa with extra marshmallows, and used that same simple line. Her daughter ended up talking for 45 minutes about how all her friends are stressing about elite college acceptances already, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t even want to go to an expensive school, she just wants to work with dogs. They didn’t solve anything that night. They didn’t make a five year plan. But the next morning, her daughter left a drawing of their golden retriever on the kitchen counter for her, which she hadn’t done in almost a year.
Javi still sits in the back of my class. He still gets Bs on quizzes, and he still stays late sometimes, though he usually just asks about extra credit now. He didn’t have some big epiphany that day, and he didn’t walk out convinced life is perfect. Last week, when a sparrow that looked just like the first one got stuck in the hallway again, he was the one who herded it slow toward the open door, holding his hoodie out to keep it from flying into the lockers. He grinned when it took off into the oak tree by the parking lot, then turned around and asked if we could do another frog dissection before winter break.
I don’t know if he still lies awake some nights wondering if any of this is worth it. I still do that sometimes, too, when the news is bad and the grading pile is tall and the car makes that weird noise I can’t afford to fix. But I know he’s got those pancakes, and those Roblox levels, and the memory of a sparrow flying out the door, stacked up now. Most days, that’s enough. You don’t need more than that to start.
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