When Your Teen Asks “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?”: What I’ve Learned as a High School Counselor and Mom
Last Tuesday, I sat at my high school counselor desk 45 minutes after the final bell. My oat milk latte had gone cold an hour earlier, and Goldfish cracker crumbs were ground into my keyboard from a panicking 9th grader’s morning history quiz visit. A soft knock came, and Javi, an 11th grader who usually dropped in only for algebra help, hovered in the frame, hood pulled up. He normally carried Sour Patch Kids and made bad slope jokes, but that day he didn’t smile. He picked at a loose thread on his sweatpants for a full minute before he looked up, voice quiet like he was sharing something forbidden: “Do people actually ever really find life worth living? Not just big trips or graduation. All the boring stuff in between.”
My first instinct was the one most adults have: jump in with a bright “Of course!” and list all the good things ahead. I almost did it. But two months earlier, my own 16-year-old son Luka had asked me almost the exact same question, on a Sunday drive home from his busing shift. He smelled like fryer oil, stared out at passing strip malls, and said it like he’d turned the thought over a hundred times: “Everyone keeps saying it gets better, but what if it’s just homework and bills and cleaning gutters forever? Is that actually worth it?”
I fumbled that first conversation with Luka. I immediately listed milestones: his first apartment, the Pacific Northwest trip he rambled about, the freedom after high school. He just shrugged and changed the subject, and I spent the rest of the night replaying it. After 12 years in schools and 16 years as a parent, I know that question hits most kids between 15 and 19, when their brains stop living only day to day and start to grasp the shape of a whole life. It’s not always a crisis, even if it sounds scary to us. Most of the time, it’s just their brain growing into abstract thought, noticing that most of life isn’t the big, celebrated moments we spend all our time chasing.
So instead of giving Javi the milestone speech, I pushed the leftover Goldfish across my desk and leaned back, like we were just killing time before a late bus. “That’s such a fair question,” I said. “I’ve wondered that too, some weeks. What made you start thinking about it lately?”
He opened up then. His grandma, who’d helped raise him while his parents worked two jobs, died six weeks earlier from a stroke. He’d sat at dinner the night before, watching his dad scroll car repair TikTok while his mom argued with the electric company over a bill. His older sister was home from college, stressed about student loans and unable to afford moving out after graduation. Everyone kept telling him he had to pick a major next year, pick a career, get good grades for a good school for a good job, and all he could think was, for what? “No one’s ever happy just existing,” he said. “Everyone’s always waiting for the next thing. What if the next thing isn’t even that good?”
He was right, in a lot of ways. We spend most of kids’ childhoods training them to chase the next thing: ace the test, make the team, get into college, land the internship. We frame all boring, ordinary days as something to get through on the way to something better. It makes sense that when they step back and look at the whole stretch, they wonder what the point of all the getting through is. We rarely talk about the stuff in between, the tiny, unremarkable bits that don’t make graduation speeches or Instagram feeds.
I told him about the week before, when I spent three hours on hold with health insurance, burned the spaghetti, forgot Luka’s field trip form, and sat in my driveway for 10 minutes after work just not wanting to go inside. Some days do feel like just a list of tasks to check off, I said. But then there’s the stuff no one warns you about: the neighbor who leaves extra tomatoes on your porch in August, the former student who DMs you a cat-in-graduation-cap meme out of nowhere, the blue Sour Patch Kid a kid saves for you because he knows it’s your favorite.
Javi smiled then, and dug the crumpled candy pack out of his hoodie. He tipped it, and the last blue one fell onto the desk between us. “My abuela always saved the blue ones for me,” he said. “I still buy a pack every Tuesday on my way to work, even though they give me canker sores.” “That’s the stuff right there,” I said. “You don’t have to have some big, fancy reason to keep showing up. That can be enough, some days.”
After Luka asked me that question in the car, I stopped trying to sell him on big future moments and started making space for small ones, no fanfare required. We started a loose routine of naming one tiny good thing from the day while loading the dishwasher, phones left on the counter. It doesn’t have to be meaningful. Some nights his is “the lunch lady gave me an extra chicken nugget” or “I laughed so hard at a goat in a sweatshirt video I snort-laughed in math.” Mine is usually boring: “the barista remembered extra foam and didn’t charge me” or “the dog didn’t bark at the mailman.” Some nights we both mumble something half-hearted and move on. It doesn’t fix anything, but it trains both of us to stop looking past ordinary days just to hunt for the next big win.
At school, I put a one-minute prompt on my homeroom whiteboard every Monday: Name one tiny thing you’re looking forward to this week that isn’t Friday or a day off. Half the answers are things like “cheese pizza Wednesday” or “my cousin’s bringing her new puppy over.” No one has to share if they don’t want to. It’s just a quiet reminder that the week isn’t just something to get through.
Of course, not every version of this question is harmless curiosity. If Javi had stopped buying his weekly candy, skipped his regular Saturday skate park trips, started sleeping through first period or gave away his favorite skateboard, I’d have sat longer, asked straight out if he was thinking about hurting himself, and connected his family to more support. The rule of thumb is simple: if they’ve stopped caring about the tiny things that used to make their days feel good, that’s when it’s more than abstract thought. But asking the question itself isn’t the warning sign. It’s just a kid asking to be honest about what life actually is, instead of the polished version we sell them.
Javi left a little after 5, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and headed for his busing shift. He didn’t say he felt all better, or that he had all the answers. He just waved and said he’d bring me a blue Sour Patch Kid next week. Last Sunday, Luka and I walked the dog after dinner, kicking acorns across the cold sidewalk, and he said out of nowhere, “I think I get it a little now. Most of it’s boring, but the boring bits have good stuff tucked in them sometimes.” I didn’t make a big speech. I just nodded, and said that’s how it works for most people, as far as I can tell. Some weeks I still wonder the same thing. Some weeks the tasks pile up and I can’t see the good bits. But there’s always another blue candy, or an extra nugget, or a silly goat video around the corner. That’s enough, for now.
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