When Your Teen Asks “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?” What I Learned As A Mom And Teacher
I’m scraping congealed spaghetti sauce off plates into the compost bin when the question hits. Two 16-year-olds are leaning against my kitchen counter, one scrolling TikTok with one hand, the other picking at a crumb on the counter, when Javi, my son’s friend who’s been sleeping over twice a week since his parents moved into separate houses, looks up and says it: “Ms. L, do you ever wonder if most people actually think life is worth living?”
The spatula clatters against the side of the bin. I turn around, and both boys are staring at me, not being edgy, just curious—the kind of open curiosity teens only let out when they think you won’t yell at them or give them a canned speech. Eli, my son, nods before I can answer. “I think about it all the time. Like, look at all the adults we know. They get up, go to work, pay bills, scroll until their eyes hurt, go on one vacation a year that they stress about planning for two months before. Is that really it? That doesn’t look that great.”
I don’t do what I used to do, which is jump in with a quick reassuring line about all the amazing things life has to offer. I’ve been a high school English teacher for 12 years, and I’ve learned that when teens ask big scary questions, they don’t want an answer they’ve already heard a hundred times from the school counselor. I pull two chairs out from the kitchen table, grab the half-batch of chocolate chip cookies I baked that afternoon, and sit down. “I actually wonder that too,” I say. “I wondered it when I was your age, and I still wonder it some weeks.”
That’s the thing no one tells you about this question: it’s not just depressed kids asking it. Last month I asked my 11th graders to write down one question they’ve always wanted to ask an adult that no one will answer honestly. Seventeen out of 28 of them wrote some version of this question. It’s not always a cry for emergency help, though sometimes it is, and you should always check in if it’s paired with talk of hurting themselves. But most of the time, it’s just kids seeing what we actually do, not what we post about, and calling our bluff. They know student debt is crippling, they know climate change will reshape their lives, they see us scrolling mindlessly after dinner instead of doing that fun hobby we tell them they should have. They don’t buy the “it gets better” line because from where they’re standing, it doesn’t look that much better than high school.
What I’ve started doing instead of jumping to answer is first asking them what got them thinking. That’s the first concrete thing any parent or teacher can do: instead of “Of course life is worth living!” just say, “That’s such a good question. What made you think about this lately?” That day, Javi told me he’d seen a TikTok thread the night before where people in their 30s were talking about how they just go through the motions to pay the mortgage and raise their kids, and no one actually enjoys most days. It matched what he saw at home: his parents don’t fight anymore now that they’re splitting up, but both of them work 10-hour days just to pay two rents, and he rarely sees either of them do anything just for fun.
Then I don’t talk about big wins. I don’t talk about getting married, or buying a house, or landing your dream job. I talk about the small, messy stuff no one posts about. I told them about last week, when I got up 20 minutes early to walk our old beagle, and a red fox stopped in the middle of the path 10 feet away from me, and we just looked at each other for 10 seconds before it trotted off into the woods. That 10 seconds didn’t get posted anywhere, it didn’t change my life, but it made that whole day feel a little brighter. I told them about how my husband sings off-key to 90s country every time he washes dishes, and it annoys me half the time, but the other half I lean against the doorway and laugh, and that’s my favorite part of most weeknights. I told them about how last semester, a student who’d struggled with writing all year turned in a personal essay that made me cry during my lunch break, and that’s why I still stay late grading papers even when I’m tired.
I also admit the bad parts. I told them about three weeks ago, when I had back-to-back parent-teacher conferences for three days, got a flat tire on the way home, and realized I’d forgotten to buy milk for the next morning’s cereal. I crawled into bed that night and thought, this whole week is just garbage, and I don’t feel like doing it again tomorrow. Admitting that doesn’t make teens more pessimistic. It makes you honest. They don’t trust adults who pretend they never feel that way.
After that night, the boys took the leftover cookies back down to the basement to play video games, and I didn’t hear anything else about the question for a week. Then Javi texted me a photo, just a big, weirdly beautiful orange mushroom growing on the side of a trail he walks after school. The text just said, “Found this. Thought you’d want the small good thing.”
I still don’t have a solid answer to the original question. Some mornings I hit snooze three times and stare at the ceiling and wonder if all the laundry and staff meetings and homework grading is worth it. Some weeks it feels like it’s just one hard thing after another. But I know this: pushing kids to feel grateful or forcing them to see the good doesn’t work. Letting them ask the question, admitting you’ve wondered it too, and pointing out the small unglamorous good stuff that no one talks about? That’s enough. It doesn’t fix everything, and it doesn’t erase the hard stuff. But it gives them something to hold onto while they figure it out for themselves.
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