When Your Teen Asks “Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?” What I Learned As A Middle School Teacher
The fluorescent lights in my classroom were already dimmed, half the kids’ desks still had crumpled gum wrappers and half-erased math problems from the day, and I was picking at a stale blueberry granola bar when Mia knocked on my door. She’s the quiet 7th grader who always wears chipped navy nail polish and carries a beat-up Totoro tote covered in sticker residue, and she’d stayed after for extra help before, but this time she didn’t have a textbook. “Can I ask you something?” she said, leaning against the doorframe, not coming in yet. I pushed my stack of grading aside and told her of course. That’s when she asked: “Do people really find life worth living?”
I’d been teaching 12 years, and I’ve gotten that question enough that I don’t panic anymore—not at first, anyway. But I still fumbled for a second, because I could see it on her face: she didn’t want the cheesy, rehearsed answer you give kids. She’d already scrolled TikTok the night before, she said, where a bunch of college-age creators were talking about how most people just fake it. They go to work, pay bills, raise kids, and wait to die, and no one actually admits most days are just kind of miserable. Her older brother, home for spring break, had said the same thing over dinner two nights before: “Don’t look forward to much, it’s all just chores.” Her mom cried twice the previous month over medical bills, her dad texts once a week from his new apartment, and Mia said she couldn’t see the point of all the homework and tests and college applications if that’s what it all leads to.
I didn’t give her the automatic “of course it is” that most adults jump to. I told her that some days I don’t. I told her about last Tuesday, two weeks before: I had a parent yell at me for 20 minutes over a 1-point grading error on a midterm, I got a flat tire on the way home that cost $120 I hadn’t budgeted for, I burned the pasta I was making for dinner, and I sat on my kitchen floor next to the trash can and thought exactly what she was thinking: what’s the point of any of this? Mia’s eyebrows went up, like she didn’t expect a teacher to say that. That’s the thing, I told her. We don’t talk about the bad days with kids. We show them the Christmas cards with the perfect family vacations, the social media posts about promotions, and we hide the days we sit on the kitchen floor. That makes kids think everyone else has it figured out, that only they’re the ones who can’t see why life is worth living.
I pulled out my phone and opened the note I keep called “Small stuff,” which I started after a 10th grader asked me the same question three years ago. Every week I add two or three things that aren’t big, aren’t achievements, just things that didn’t suck that week. That week’s list had: the first grader who brought me a dandelion he picked on the playground, my cat curled up on my grading stack so I had to stop working and pet him for 10 minutes, the gas station iced coffee that was still cold when I got to school, finding a forgotten mini chocolate bar in the pocket of my winter coat when I pulled it out of the back of the closet.
Mia stared at it for a minute and said “That’s it? Those are all tiny.” I said yeah, that’s the point. No one feels like life is worth living because of some big grand thing every single day. Most people don’t have some big purpose that makes every hard day worth it. What we have is a bunch of tiny things that add up, some weeks more than others. Some weeks there’s nothing, and that’s okay too. That doesn’t mean life is never worth it, it just means that week was garbage.
After that conversation, I started doing a two-minute check-in every Friday in homeroom. No grades, no pressure, everyone writes down one tiny thing that was okay that week. No big achievements allowed—you can’t write “got an A on my science test” but you can write “my dog greeted me at the door after school” or “the cafeteria had chocolate chip cookies today.” Parents can do this at dinner too, instead of asking “how was school” which always gets “fine,” ask for one tiny okay thing from the day. It takes 30 seconds, no big discussion required.
The biggest mistake I see parents and teachers make when a kid asks this question is rushing to fix it. They either say “Of course life is worth living! You have so much to be grateful for!” which just makes the kid feel like they’re wrong for asking, so they don’t ask again. Or they panic and rush them to a counselor (which is necessary if the kid is talking about hurting themselves, don’t get me wrong) but most of the time, this is just a kid working through the fact that adult life isn’t the perfect highlight reel we sold them. They just need an honest answer, not a perfect one.
A month after Mia came to my room, she slipped a folded note into my school mailbox. It said “I saw a baby sparrow fall out of the tree by the bus stop yesterday. Me and the crossing lady helped put it back in the nest. That’s my small thing. I guess there’s at least some of those.” It didn’t fix everything. Last week she told me she still thinks adulthood looks mostly boring, that she still has days where she doesn’t want to get out of bed. Her parents are still navigating their divorce, money is still tight at her house. She hasn’t suddenly become the kid who’s always cheerful.
I still have her note taped to the edge of my desk. Last night I knocked over my coffee while I was grading, stained three essays, and ate a granola bar that tasted like cardboard. I still added something to my small stuff list that day: Mia’s note. I don’t have a grand answer to the question she asked. Some days I think yes, some days I’m not sure. That’s the point, I think. We don’t have to give kids a perfect answer. We just have to stop lying about the hard days, and show them where to find the small ones that add up. Most days, that’s enough.
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