When Your Teen Asks ‘Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?’ What I’ve Learned As A Teacher And Parent
The bell had just rung for dismissal on a rainy Tuesday last October, and I was shoving stacked essays into my canvas bag when I looked up and saw Mia still leaning against my classroom door. Her gray hoodie had a faded hole at the elbow, and she was picking at a chip in her black nail polish, not moving with the crowd rushing down the hall. When the last kid left, she pushed off the doorframe and said, “That thing we talked about in class today, about Gatsby wondering if any of it was worth it. Do you think most people actually do think life is worth living? Like, really?”
I’d been asked that exact question, word for word, just two months earlier by my own 16-year-old son. It was after a 19-year-old from our town, a kid a lot of local teens knew, died by suicide, and my son was sitting on our kitchen counter waiting for our frozen pizza to finish baking, scrolling through TikTok. He looked up mid-scroll and asked the same thing.
My first instinct that night with my son was to panic. I blurted out, “Are you okay? Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” and he just rolled his eyes, said “No, I just asked a question,” grabbed the pizza when the timer went off, and shut himself in his room for the rest of the night. We didn’t talk about it again for a month. I’d messed up that first interaction, and I remembered that when Mia asked me the same question in my classroom.
I didn’t panic this time. I just wiped a crumpled granola bar wrapper off the empty chair by my desk, gestured for her to sit, and said, “What got you thinking about that?”
She talked for 15 minutes. She said almost every night on social media, she sees people talking about how they’re just “going through the motions.” Everyone posts their perfect vacation photos and good grades, but the comments are full of people saying they don’t actually enjoy anything—they just wake up, go to school or work, eat, sleep, and do it all again the next day. She pointed out the adults she lived with: her mom works 10-hour shifts at the local hospital, comes home, eats dinner, and falls asleep on the couch every single night. Her grandma retired last year, and all she does is complain about her bad knee and how empty the days feel. No one she saw close up seemed to actually think this whole life thing was worth the effort.
I pulled a blank index card out of my desk drawer and handed her a pen. I told her about the conversation with my son, and my mistake, then asked her to do one small thing with me. “Write down three ordinary people you see every week, no celebrities or close friends. Next to each name, write one small thing they do that makes it look like they think it’s worth showing up for.”
She thought for a minute, then started writing. First was Ms. Rita, the lunch lady at school. She wrote that Ms. Rita always slips extra peaches to freshmen who forgot their lunch money, sings old Patsy Cline songs off key while wiping down tables, and talks every day about her 4-year-old grandson’s dinosaur digs in her backyard. Second was Ms. Lee, the part-time art teacher. She wrote that Ms. Lee keeps a jar of old buttons from thrifted shirts in her room and gives them out to any kid who wants to mess around with art, and she stays after school every Wednesday to throw pottery even though arthritis makes her hands ache for days after. Third was her dad. She wrote that he gets up at 5 a.m. every Saturday to drive 45 minutes to a small lake up north to fish, he almost never catches anything bigger than your hand, but he still brings whatever he catches home to show her and fries it for lunch.
When she finished writing, she looked up and said, “I never thought about that before. They all do this stuff even when it’s hard, right?”
I think as parents and teachers, we get this question wrong so often. We either treat it as an immediate crisis (which it can be, of course, and you should always dig deeper if you have real concerns, but most of the time it’s just a kid working through a new developmental stage: they’re just figuring out that adulthood isn’t all the big happy moments we show on social media, it’s a lot of boring, tired, hard days. Or we jump into a big, shiny speech about how amazing life is, which sounds totally fake to them, because they can see the tired, boring parts right in front of their faces.
The small exercise I did with Mia isn’t some fix-all, but it works better than any speech I’ve ever given. It’s low effort, no prep, just a way to help them shift their focus from the curated highlight reel online to the real, messy lives people around them live every day. The concrete things I’ve started doing that other parents and teachers can try too are simple: first, don’t rush to answer. Just ask “What got you thinking about that?” and let them talk first, don’t jump in to fix the feeling. Second, if they’re still stuck on the question, try that three-people exercise, it lets them find their own answer instead of you giving them one. Third, be honest about your own bad days. Don’t lie and say you never wonder if it’s worth it. I told Mia that last month I graded 60 essays on a rainy Sunday, spilled coffee all over my favorite sweater, and sat on my couch thinking the whole thing felt pointless. I told her the answer that night was a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a bad reality show with my son, and that was enough. Small things don’t sound impressive, but they’re the stuff life is actually made of.
It’s been a little over a month since that conversation with Mia. She stopped by my room after school last week, and pulled that crumpled index card out of her phone case. She’d added a fourth name: the boy in her chemistry class who keeps a bag of mini chocolate bars in his backpack and passes one out to everyone before a test. She said she still doesn’t have the big, perfect answer to the question, but it doesn’t feel as scary as it did before.
My son still has whole weeks where he says everything feels pointless and boring. Last Saturday, though, he took our golden retriever for a walk up the hill behind our house right before sunset, and came home with a pocket full of acorns he said he wanted to use for a wreath on our mantel. He leaned against the kitchen door, wiped mud off his shoes on the mat, and said “That walk was good. Worth getting out of bed for.” No big speech, no perfect resolution. Just a small thing, that’s enough for now.
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