When Your Teen Asks ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’: Advice From A Teacher And Mom
It’s 4:15 on a Tuesday, my kitchen smells like microwave popcorn and dish soap, my 16-year-old son is slouched in a dining chair peeling the label off a root beer bottle, and I’m hunched over a stack of 11th grade personal essays, red grading pen bleeding through the pages. His soccer uniform is balled up by the back door, the dishwasher is humming through its rinse cycle, and out of nowhere he says, “Do people really find life worth living? Like, actually?”
I froze. I’ve been a high school English teacher for 12 years, I’ve had every version of this conversation in my classroom after units on existentialism, after a student loses a friend, or just after a brutal week of midterms. But when my own kid asks it, my first instinct was to blurt out the fake happy answer: “Of course! Life is so beautiful!” But I bit it back. Because just three days earlier, I’d read a journal entry from one of my students, Javi, that asked the exact same question, plain as day: “I go to school, I practice soccer, I eat dinner with my family. I do everything I’m supposed to. I still don’t know why anyone says this is worth it.”
I remembered what happened when I talked to Javi after class that day. I first leaned in and said, “It absolutely is, you just have to look for the good stuff, right?” He just stared at the scuffed toe of his sneaker and nodded, and I knew I’d blown it. He didn’t leave feeling better; he left feeling like his question was wrong to ask.
So back to my son. I closed my grading notebook, pushed the half-eaten leftover pizza between us, and said, “That’s such a good question. What made you think about that today?” He said one of the kids in his grade posted an Instagram story saying he was tired of faking that everything is okay, and all the comments were just “it gets better bro” and “think positive!” and it all felt fake. Because no one ever says when it doesn’t feel good, right?
I told him the truth. I said I don’t think most people walk around every day feeling like life is 100% worth it. I told him about his grandma, who lived with chronic rheumatoid arthritis for 22 years. Some days she’d sit on her back porch and say, “I’m so tired of hurting. I don’t know if this is worth it.” And we’d sit with her, we didn’t tell her she was wrong, we didn’t give her a pep talk. And then a week later, she’d be canning peaches from the tree in her yard, complaining that the crop was smaller this year but grinning the whole time. I told my son I have bad days too—days where I grade 35 essays, pick up his dirty socks from the bathroom, pay the electric bill, and I think, what is the point of all this? It doesn’t mean I want to stop living, it just means some days it doesn’t feel worth it. That’s okay.
As a teacher and a mom, I’ve noticed the two biggest mistakes most of us make when kids ask this question. First, we panic. We immediately assume it means they’re suicidal, that something is terribly wrong. Of course you should always check: if they’re asking this question, ask them straight if they’re hurting or feeling unsafe—that’s non-negotiable. But most of the time, this is just what teens do. Their brains are finally able to think about big abstract questions, they’re starting to see all the broken stuff in the world—climate change, overpriced college, all the adults yelling at each other online—and they’re calling our bluff. We tell them life is great if you work hard, and they’re looking around going, is it, though? That’s not a crisis, that’s growing up.
Second, we rush to fix it with generic pep talks that don’t help. After I messed up my first conversation with Javi, I tried something different. I said, “Can you tell me one small thing this week that didn’t feel like just going through the motions?” He sat there for a minute, twisting his soccer bracelet around his wrist, and said he stopped on the walk home from school to feed a stray cat half his granola bar, and the cat rubbed against his leg and purred so loud he could feel it through his jeans. That was it. I didn’t say “that’s the meaning of life!” I just said, “Yeah. That’s the stuff that adds up, isn’t it?” He left my class smiling, which I don’t see very often from him.
What I’ve started doing, both at home and in my classroom, is small, concrete stuff that works way better than pep talks. If a kid asks this question, three simple things help: first, answer with “That’s such a good question, what made you think of that?” instead of an immediate fix. It lets them talk more instead of shutting down. Second, be honest about your own bad days. You don’t have to dump all your stress on them, but saying “I had a day last week where I didn’t feel like anything was worth it either” takes away the shame of feeling that way. Third, ask them to name one tiny good thing that happened recently. It doesn’t have to be big—it can be a good bite of food, a cat rubbing on them, a cool breeze on a hot day. You don’t have to turn it into a big life lesson. Just acknowledge it.
Last night, I got Javi’s new journal entry back. He wrote, “I still don’t know if life is worth it overall. No one’s given me a good answer yet. But the stray cat came back today, and I had an extra granola bar. So that’s something.” I underlined that line and wrote “Me too” in the margin. This morning, I found a sticky note on my coffee mug from my son, that said “Peach iced tea from the gas station is really good today. Don’t forget to drink it.”
We haven’t solved the big question. Some days will still feel heavy, some days my son will leave his dirty uniform on the floor and Javi will still write gloomy journal entries and I’ll still have days where I think what’s the point. That’s okay. The question doesn’t need a perfect answer. It just needs someone who won’t tell you it’s wrong to ask.
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